


Dipshits in space: Season number B

by AdrianOzryth



Series: Dipshits in space season number B [1]
Category: dipshits in space
Genre: Comedy, Goofy - Freeform, Sci-Fi, Slapstick, dipshits, self-aware, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24409834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdrianOzryth/pseuds/AdrianOzryth
Summary: The Crew of the SS Tast-E-Chill are back, probably because they never left to begin with. The same level of random stupidity has continued beyond and into darkness, in this moderately anticipated squeal of the ongoing series that thinks it's a TV show, that has been crammed into book form. Joint the Captain and most of his crew, including a brand new pair of strange characters, one of which is actually plot-important. Everything you surely liked about the first season only, um, sequal-y-er, because clearly you are clicking the second installation, and therefore have low standards on jokes. Hop aboard and look for a seat-belt as you dive head-first into another layer of the same dips, doing different $h!+s, and still in space. This sucker has everything, a shiny new ship, new enemies, new worlds to explore and a brand new compact format of fewer episodes than you may expect, shortened for convenience and definitely not because my clumsy @$$ deleted like 5 episodes well after starting season 3. That didn't happen at all. Season 3 has a frigging buttload of episodes, so it evens out. Just...bear with me people. you should expect this by now, you read the first season, you know how half-@$$ed this is.
Series: Dipshits in space season number B [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1762768





	1. Episode 16: Pirate Booty

"Hey…" Marley said, putting his feet up and staring at the stars.   
"Yea." Yawned Captain Lawg."   
"You know those movies where two bachelor dudes just travel the world and have fun being bachelors and constantly finding adventure and women and no matter where they go they got each other's back so they don’t need no hoes tying them down?" he asked.   
"Yep." Lawg said as his eyes glazed over.   
"That's Fricken bullshit, Lawg." he muttered as the camera view drew back to show a rather haphazard den filled with empty soda cans and liquor bottles, and random clothes. All around lie hundreds of paper-towels everywhere, like a small burning-man festival run by tiny freeloaders who had popped up tents in the middle of the ship.   
"I agree. This is intolerable, no women, nobody to clean or make space travel seem actually fun…just drifting and silence…only coffee to warm our souls." Lawg said darkly, sipping his gin and gin cocktail with a look of disgust…because it’s gin.   
“Coffee is gone.” Marley noted.   
“Depresso.” Lawg whispered. “What about that artificial instant crap?”   
“One container, but it’s pumpkin spice.” He shrugged.   
“Unaccepta-brew.” He growled.   
"What happened to the luck of the Chaffee? What happened to the universe providing? She hasn’t provided jack shit for what feels like eternity." Marley said "The women gone and the Robot is still crashed from the bad update, this blows." he added.   
"Lady Luck ran out about when the paper towels did." Lawg sighed.   
"We're out of paper towels? That’s great, so when we spill something or burn a spot in the carpet, what are we gonna cover it with? We can't use toilet paper, we're already rationing it out." he said looking back at the impressive camp of tiny tents stretching through the ship. There was a thump and they both looked excited, like Santa had dropped in from the galactic north-pole bringing eggnog and ho-ho-hoes, both furry and non. Duffy stepped out of the cargo bay and was met with a sudden hug from both of them.   
"What is that smell?" she asked Lawg.  
"It's us…we went smell-blind days ago. The shower wont drain, water pressure is a trickle and we have been taking turns bathing in the engine room with hand towels and vodka. It stings, Duffy, it strings the tender bits. Make the water go down." Lawg slurred.   
"Damn, I leave you for 2 days and you turn into trolls, do I even wanna know what you did with the paper towels?" She asked.   
"It's been weeks!" Marley objected.   
"Look, check my communicator watch. It's been 52 hours since I left. Two days and 4 hours since I left and you wrecked the ship…what is this crap?" she said cautiously touching the towel-tent by her foot. Marley looked ashamed.   
"Spilled a bag of peanuts." he said softly.   
"So you just hid it under a paper towel?" she asked.   
"The vacuum broke right after you left, didn’t know how to clean it so we decided to just quarantine the mess and it kinda just escalated from there.”   
"How do you break the vacuum cleaner…its just a hose that leads to space and a valve to open it…we are IN the vacuum. No, never mind. This is ridiculous. Lawg is so sober he can barely stand because you can't unclog a drain and you've been bathing in booze? Again…it’s a drain into to space. If it clogs, you open it and close it and it's fixed. And how many bathes could you possibly need in 2 days and still somehow smell like a death-fart in a brewery?" she asked.  
"When you didn’t call back in, we assumed that you bailed and we freaked out." Marley said pouting.  
"This is just nuts." she shrugged.   
"Only the first pile is nuts. The rest is cookie crumbs and drink spills." Marley said, receiving a very lethargic and depressed fist bump from Lawg. Before he could make connection, Duffy smacked his hand away and scolded them for the terrible joke.   
"How did you survive before Uka came aboard?" Duffy asked Lawg.   
"I've always had a maid crew, made a habit of having bimbos around, hired cleaners, space-hookers, really lonely women, broke and basically just thrilled to be in space so I've never had to clean anything myself. Marley showed up after Uka did and we spend most of that time before that freezing to death, because I sold the roof." Lawg said, wobbling a bit.   
"What about you?" she asked Marley.   
"I was a planet-bunny before I was a space-bunny. Delmarian's don’t do much cleaning, we mostly just move slowly away from the squalor until we run out of planet, then we sell it…its why most of us developed into brainless warriors with more brawn than dignity…constant Fupar challenges keep the population down pretty well. Basic natural selection." he explained.   
"Who buys trash? Duffy asked.   
"You’d be amazed how many species consider it terraforming. Delmarian's who don’t end up Warriors usually end up politicians…probably why everyone either fears us or hates us." he shrugged "You can see why I got out of Delar."   
"I thought the Delmar system was inhabited by Carrots?" asked Lawg.   
"Used to be. We ate them…we ate them all, Duffy. Those delicious bastards didn’t put up much fight, Delmarian home world was super-disappointed." he yawned.   
"So any word from Uka?" Duffy asked Marley   
"Nope, she either hasn’t found a cure for panda or she likes the panda planet more then us. Total radio-silence. I would be mad at her for bailing, but we do kinda suck, so I can't blame her. I kinda wanted to stay on the panda planet too, but those chicks are so clingy. One hour of conversation and 2 bamboo shots and they want you to meet their parents. I just wanted a good price on the cargo." Marley said flopping back on the couch. Duffy looked at Lawg. Her eyes spoke volumes of irritation.   
"You're a bad influence on him." she muttered.   
"Yes I am. before I came along he had a booming and respectable career as a nearly dead bunny all lined out for him, right after his bounty-hunter career fell through and a mutiny left him stranded, right after he left his wife and planet that he hated, in order to explore space with his asshole cousins…you know…before I influenced him to have a little fun in life and make triple his life savings to spend on more panda booty than he would have ever seen in a lifetime." he said dryly.   
"Touché, a worthy move Captain." she nodded.   
"Sorry, it’s the lack of beer talking. I'm a dick when I can't drink." he said sitting down. She pulled her emergency flask from her overalls and handed it to him.   
“You have gin.”  
“I would almost rather die, so I’ve been rationing the gin.”   
"Don’t worry, the 3 of us can survive without her. I survived on a ship by myself for like 18 months and I didn’t even have someone to hand me screwdrivers."  
"Screwdrivers are amazing." Lawg said zoning out.   
"I mean the tool… not the drink. Pointy stabby thing that turns screws." she sighed.   
"They named a tool after the drink? I always wondered how they got screws in things so tightly." he yawned. "I tried hammering them in but they always break."  
"Point remains…if I can make an carbon monoxide filter from a sock, tape and a plastic adapter fittings, fabricate a working lavatory from a trash can, motherboard fan and chewing gum…I can keep this bucket of idiots flying without Uka or the damn robots help…and eventually I can fix the robot." she added.   
"What exactly happened to him?" asked Lawg.   
"Software update. I think he accidentally clicked the free offer to upgrade to Viewports 10 software…he's mostly pirated parts so he doesn’t have a touch-screen and it just ruined his processor drivers. Lights blinked, there was smoke, chickens were shat…total mayhem. Easy fix if we had access to outdated software nodes but this whole Quadrant is frigging Federal space." Duffy shrugged.   
"Can't we send him back and just say he was defective when we got him?" asked Lawg.  
"No honey…because he escaped federal recycling and is stuffed full of illegal software, an alien personality matrix and about 50 torrented albums of show tunes, at least one trilogy that was made illegal to own because it was too shitty. That would be a 500 credit fine and blacklisting from Tech-mart for the first two…but torrented music in these parts is punishable by death." she reminded.   
"Should we just dump him and get another robot" he asked.   
"For one…that robot has a name. For two…that robot has a hyperspace link to our only ally and only backup in existence…and thirdly…my personal favorite reason: you registered him in his database with the email address of: WilliamTLawg@PersonalwifioftheStarshipTastEChill.net#awesome." she recited.   
"Even I can't remember that." he muttered almost silently.   
"So, effectively it's just us 3 now, right on the border of uncharted space and Federal Space and we either have to put him in storage or find some pirates who can fix him." she finished.   
"Bummer…Screwdriver?" he asked, holding out a thermos, he just finished pouring with unknown liquids.   
"It's not vodka and orange juice is it?" she asked.   
"Pretty much. I used isopropyl Alcohol from the med kit and orange flavored antacids…probably pretty close." he said as she swiped the bottle.   
"Don’t drink that. You'll die. Anyway, we are 3 days from a supply station and the Federal Border post, so just relax and don’t be as much like a bag of douches as you normally are. Duffy will fix everything…and I am keeping track of my hours and bonuses so you owe me a lot of favors when we get you good and liquored back to normality…basically, I own the ship until you can cough up 2000 credits. I'm also adding interest." she reminded.   
"Well you better, it's in all our interests that this ship stays afloat." he soberly slurred.  
"Well, it's space…not an ocean, so even if we vent the air and die, the ship will always float…forever…without us." she grinned.   
"That’s the optimism I made mandatory last month. Now just keep that optimistic denial and apply it to the crew and we are basically immortal. Good job, I knew appointing you to chief morale officer were a good idea." he grinned.   
"Again…not a real title or job, I know you are just making it up so I don’t feel like the maid and cook as a way of psychologically manipulating me like some kind of shrink."  
"And how does that make you feel?" he asked.   
"Eh." she shrugged.   
"Good enough. Now put away Duffy the patient, and put on Duffy the pilot's official uniform." he said. She stood silently, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She took a bottle cap from her pocket and pinned it to her overalls. He saluted and staggered away. 

"Ugh." she sighed. "That idiot is lucky that I find the scruffy look irresistible or I would let him drink this toxic crap and buy myself a commodore hat. Commodore Duffy…Ruler of the Tast-E-Fleet, Captain of the Flagship Tast-E-Chill, Queen of the shuttlecraft empire." she muttered to herself with a slight musical tone. 

Lawg woke to a room of panic, alarms and ice-cream jingles drowned out by sprinting footsteps and his crew debating actions. Duffy grabbed his arm as Marley hopped on him, holding him down as he struggled and Duffy stuck a syringe in his bicep. He let out a very feminine scream as she dumped it into his veins.   
"IT BURNS!..It burns like the space-clap." he said nearly crying.   
"Mainline of grain alcohol and adrenaline…I bet it tingled like hell, but we are otherwise out of booze and we need you coherent like right now. We have Pirates approaching at full speed." Duffy said.   
"Whose idea was it to make injections of this? And aren't we actively looking for pirates?" he asked, feeling his crippling sobriety fade.   
"My idea." smiled Marley. "And yes, we were looking for software pirates…however…we found different pirates instead." he said helping him to his feet.   
"What kind of pirates? Theme-park pirates who sing and dance?" he asked optimistically. “With their silver buckle slipper and their tight shiny pants?  
"Nope, literal pirates. The kind that kill you and steal your booty." Duffy said, handing him his trusty air-drill mock-weapon.   
"My booty?…first gay robots and now gay pirates after my booty?" he said freaking out.   
"Not ass-booty; Valuables-booty. Anything worth money…pirate booty." Duffy explained. He looked equally concerned.   
"Do they pick one or do they do both? If we have disappointing loot, will they still be after my booty?" he asked.   
"Forget I even said booty, they just want to rob us…that's what pirates do, they rob you." she barked.   
"Don’t forget killing us…most of them do that too." Marley reminded.   
"Yea, but that's hit and miss, some kill you and some just leave you for dead with no valuables or supplies, so it could go either way." Duffy scoffed. "Dead or not we still get robbed." she added. Lawg clicked the safety off the air-drill and racked the slide to chamber a round.   
"I don’t want either of those things." he whined. Duffy stopped him and looked him in the face.   
"Then keep your cool and follow my lead, secondly…that is a drill, not a gun, so stop checking to see if it's loaded." she reminded. Marley rushed beside them with his leafblower, putting on his bounty-hunter armor and dragging a large piece of cardboard behind him.   
"What's that for?" asked Lawg.   
"I printed it before I left, figured we could use it if we ran into trouble." she assured. 

The view screen turned on as the pirates hailed them. Marley stood on a box in front of a poster of a Delmarian bridge room as Duffy and Lawg posed way back behind the cut-out of the doorway for perspective to make Marley look larger. His voice boomed through the helmet modulator.   
"I am Captain Suva, of the 4th Delmarian Infantry." Marley bluffed. "Back off of our experimental shuttle craft, or your tailgating will be seen as aggression. You may stand some chance against a shuttle, but our stealth cruiser is only minutes away from our location." he bluffed.   
"Captain Betty Black of the Destroyer Ship Nautilus. Delmarian cruiser you say?" asked a voice…a female voice. She didn’t seem to be very alarmed. "Our scans show you have only one cannon and minimal shielding…pretty light for Delmarian, even a shuttle craft." said the voice among the black screen.   
"I don’t mean to break these conversations, but you're not showing up on the screen, I think your web-cam might be turned off or obstructed." Marley said as Duffy face-palmed in the background.   
"Maybe I put tape over it to prevent people from hacking and watching me. This sector is full of pirates you know. Maybe I don’t want my enemies having any recording to report to authorities." she said calmly. Marley turned and muted the feed. Lawg threw his hands up in annoyance.   
"See? Why didn’t we just do that? It's more believable and doesn’t require this elaborate cutout or perspective trick." he asked. Duffy looked puzzled as Marley pondered the complexity.   
"It's a plan at least."   
"Actually it does seem simpler. It's intimidating as hell, I mean I can hear her female voice and I'm still intimidated because she could be enormous or something. The imagination creates your own fears, like I am thinking now that maybe she is a giant shrimp…that's way more terrifying than a single Delmarian and a fake backdrop…I mean those guards are just a still shot, it ruins the effect." Marley pointed out.   
"You know…" Duffy said turning towards him. "I spent 3 hours printing out sheets of paper and gluing them together and this is what I get? I can't just create a holographic bridge that shows 15 moving, interacting, Delmarian soldiers pacing around so a frozen image is all we got. I think I did a good job, and the door illusion was brilliant, so we have us moving back here to complete the effect." she said defensively.   
"But that's my point." said Lawg turning to argue. "Why are two humanoids on a Delmarian ship? Why are the Delmarian's in full battle gear and just sitting motionless in their chairs while two humans stand in the doorway and move around? It makes no sense, it just draws attention to the question of why the Delmarians are cool with us aliens blocking the doorway to the bridge." he preached. “That’s a fire hazard. As flammable furry critters, Delmarians take fire safety very seriously.”   
"At least I did something…what did you do to make this ship safer? You didn’t install the new shielding or seatbelts like you promised…you waited to the last minute and then the robot broke and we couldn’t get them online. You know 1 in 5 starship injuries is a direct result of weapon fire flinging people out of chairs? Nobody has seatbelts on these ships bridges and when I suggest it…I'm cramping your style." she barked. He got defensive and stood closer.   
"You know, it’s a good thing we have you to bitch about everything because with Uka gone…I was worried nobody would fill that vital role. Race-cars didn’t have seatbelts, neither did roller coasters and they were awesome…I'm not putting seatbelts in this beast and turning it into a school-bus or some kind of public transportation. There is a reason starships don’t have seatbelts…it’s a fire hazard. You can go anywhere if a fire breaks out and starts burning everything and the belt jams." he argued.   
"Go where? We're in space! We can barely land this kind of ship; the cardboard would buckle under any atmospheric pressure above 30 PSI and with 1.0 Earth Gravity or higher we can't take off with the current engines. This ship is designed to stay in space, so if there is a fire we are just screwed anyway." she screamed as Marley waved their attention.   
"Um, guys. It just went to screensaver. Another 2 minutes and it will go into sleep mode and they will probably think we hung up on them and open fire. So can you stop discussing our plan so I can unmute it real fast?" he asked. They both switched to intimidating faces and stood silently as he re-opened the Coms.   
"Sorry about that. We had another call. It was important." Marley bluffed in his menacing voice. The female Captain's voice appeared through the ambient laughter.   
"You realize when your coms go to screensaver, we can still see you? It doesn’t go black on our end, it just makes the LCD screens last longer." chuckled the intimidating female voice. "And just because you muted it doesn’t mean I can't read your lips." she added.   
"Oh…good to know. I didn’t know that…did you guys know that?" he asked them. They both shook their heads." Seriously guys…this is why we need to keep the manuals for these things, knowledge is power." Marley added.   
"Prepare to be boarded. Any resistance and we will teleport back and destroy your ship without warning." she said ending the feed. Marley took off his helmet.   
"That's deceptive as hell, you'd think when the screen goes to screensaver that they would also lose picture and show the dancing swirls on both ends. Who designed this software? Why would anyone want to keep coms open and allow your enemy to still see you while going to screensaver on our end? That’s just half-assed beta testing." he complained. 

The door opened and in walked a very tall humanoid woman with yellow eyes and dark red hair, almost black. Her smile had 2 distinct fangs and her hair was cut into a meticulous gothic style with bangs and a rather large hog-ring in her nose. For a woman nearly reaching 6 foot 6, she was fairly attractive, even through the monstrous features. She smiled and strutted to the bridge, where Marley aimed his leaf-blower and the others stood armed with air-drills.   
"Not very intimidating for a Delmarian vessel." she joked. "The room seems to have changed considerably too, did your imaginary soldiers run out of tape?" she asked.   
"See, I told you it looked fake." Lawg said to Duffy. She gave him an angry look and he turned to the beastly captain for clarity. "For the record…was it the awkward frozen poses or did you just know we were bluffing?" he asked the Pirate Captain.   
"They frozen guards were suspicious, but not as suspicious as two humans standing in the doorway of a Delmarian bridge." she chuckled.   
"See." he muttered.   
"I was rather deceived by your Delmarian Captain though, I expected him to be an adult Delmarian." she said nodding in approval.   
"Hey bitch…I'm not a child, I'm a grown-ass Delmarian Male of 16 years old, We age twice as fast, I just happen to be a runt." he defended, feeling like he insulted himself in the process.   
"Adorable. I was prepared to suffer a few possible injuries to your Delmarian crewman, but now I have no concern for that." she said arrogantly. Marley's eyes twitched with anger.  
"Drop your gun and let's take it to the cargo bay. My size isn't impressive but I'm tough when it counts, lady, so if you think you're so tough, how about you see what I'm made of 1 on 1 and rethink those casualties." he growled. She placed her pistol on the counter and stepped closer with her arms held out.   
"Can you back up that claim little bunny?" she grinned, showing her sharp teeth.   
"Nope, I got nothing…just playing the last card I had." he sighed sadly. Lawg broke the mood pointing his drill.   
"Hey, we got weapons here. You may have the bigger ship but we could take a few of you down in the process, you boarded the wrong ship." Lawg said angrily pointing his air-drill.   
"Since your tactics seem to be rather reliant on bluffing and you are both wielding mechanic's tools, I am assuming the device your Delmarian has is not a weapon either." she said casually flicking the leaf-blower and sitting down.   
"Damn…she's good." Duffy said.   
"You Fupared a Delmarian Warrior with your bare hands didn’t you? You can take her. Don’t you have super-strength?" he encouraged.   
"No I can't, I don’t have superpowers, I'm just Irish. A 230 pound bunny is one thing but she is an Atkin. She'd kill me before I left a mark." Duffy whispered.   
"What's an Atkin?" he asked.   
"Human Descendant species, they lived on Delta 3 so long they adapted to the planet's conditions. Their skin is like trying to get through a wire reinforced truck-tire, they can see in pitch darkness, blood-suckers, usually cannibalistic. Their only weakness is the soft spot in the mid belly that they keep covered in armor. Only other wekness is exposure to highly powerful UV light, like vampires." she explained. Lawg had an idea. He popped up triumphantly.   
"Aha! Computer… increase lighting to ten thousand percent!" he ordered, jumping behind the console, rolling and pulling his shirt over his head. Nobody else reacted except the computer voice. The lights brightened just slightly. The enemy Captain just squinted with mild annoyance, applying her shades. The computer beeped   
"Lighting increased from standard 80 to 100 percent, unable to raise lighting further." the computer voice noted.   
"Shit." Lawg sighed, still hiding in his shirt and slumping further in a depressed aura of failure. He stood up with his head still in his shirt and raised his hands in surrender.   
"You really think your ship would have default lighting bright enough to scorch flesh? Why would that even be an option? They're LED based dumb-ass, they don’t even give off UV radiation." she said looking less amused. "But I admire your feeble persistence. It is your respectable guts and your obvious mental lacking that made me decide to offer you a deal." she said walking slowly to the Fusion parked in the bridge.   
"Fifty-fifty split?" asked an optimistic Marley. "Take half and let us go because we are so pathetic?"   
"Hardly. I will be taking all your cargo, your valuables and your rations. I will also be disabling your guns and shields and in exchange for your lives, I want complete submission of one request." she grinned slyly.   
"This already sounds like it could be worse then death." Marley muttered.   
"Space is a lonely place, and even Captains can appreciate a fine specimen." She grinned sinisterly. Duffy scoffed and sat down shaking her head 

"Oh good grief, just have at him…freaking Luck of the Chaffee." Duffy groaned. "I swear, Lawg can get laid anywhere, Marley was right, nobody else ever gets lucky.” 

"Hey, I'm not just a piece of meat to throw to the ladies. My sex appeal may be a gift, but I have feelings…maybe I don’t find her attractive. You did the same thing with the Nug-head and now this." he protested.   
"Who cares if you find her attractive, if it gets us out of a pinch, man up and satisfy that enormous woman. Take one for the team Lawg." she barked. Captain Black smirked a little.   
"When did I say I wanted the scrawny captain?" she said crossing her arms. Marley's eyes got really big and then she turned to Duffy, who looked alarmed.   
"Oh come on." she huffed.   
"Man up Duffy, it's about the good of the team, remember?" Lawg smiled. 

"You guys both suck." Duffy growled. Marley shook his head and fiddled with the leaf blower, noticing a little green switch he never flipped before. He flipped it. The leaf-blower made a strange sound like it was charging up. He turned to face Captain Black and pushed the ON button. The barrel flashed and he went flying back into the console as a green fireball sent Captain Black backwards into the teleporter. His ears perked up and he dashed to the control panel.   
"SPONTANIOUS IDEA!" he hollered, mashing the buttons. The teleporter activated and Captain Black stood up, her eyes squinting and just as she opened her mouth to curse them…she dematerialized silently.   
"Nice job, furball. I thought the teleporter was broken?" asked Duffy   
"I never said broken, just unsafe to use on living beings like us. The buffer kept crapping out and I didn’t want anyone getting teleported in two pieces or anything, kinda irrelevant in this case so I took that small chance. Didn’t really care if it worked safely on her, served its purpose either way." he grinned.   
"Where did you send her?" asked Lawg.   
"No friggin clue. I just hit like 8 buttons and pushed go." he shrugged.   
"I have an idea." Duffy said, punching some keys and heading to the view screen. 

The coms turned on and another female voice started to speak. Duffy interrupted.   
"Shut up bitch, you might learn something. We may have no weapons and practically no shielding but we have your Captain by the scruff. We just teleported her half a light-year into space and by my estimations she has just enough oxygen to last about…30 minutes. So you can either stay here and kill us or go get your lead butch before she suffocates, and if you don’t believe us…check your scans for a recent teleporter activation and scan us to see how many of your kind are onboard. Your move. Here are the coordinates." she said signing out and standing with her arms crossed. After a few long seconds of silence, the ship turned and headed to the direction she sent them.   
"We didn’t give her any oxygen." Lawg muttered.   
"I know, we also didn’t have a clue where we teleported her so I just made up coordinates. Worked though." he grinned  
"So…you doctored the last transport record and gave them random coordinates. Aren't they gonna be pretty mad when they realize their captain isn't there? They will probably come back and hunt us down." Lawg said dryly.   
"Oh the coordinates I gave them aren't random. That's right in the middle of Nug-head space, just past the territory dispute line where two warring factions are currently attacking anything that crosses the line. If I remember correctly, there are absolutely no markings or territory buoys to alert you of its location…I also remember that Nug-heads like their woman subservient and silent." she grinned. Lawg smiled with approval.  
"Well that will make for a fine bit of fun, part of me wishes I could see it, the other part is just glad to be adrift. Set a course for the next station." Lawg said placing his right foot on the console, as if the Captain had a bit of Captain in him…and it was fairly likely to happen at some point. 

"Kind of ironic though." Marley said. They both looked to see what he was talking about. "I mean…they kinda were after the booty after all, just not Lawg's booty. I find that ironic. Plus we didn’t die and that makes me happy."   
"I'm still trying to grasp how the leafblower was a gun this whole time…and you were pointing that thing around for months as a joke." Duffy pointed out.   
"I could have killed us all…whacky fun. Space is a hell of a thing." he said shuffling off for a snack.   
"Hey wait…who is gonna clean this gigantic mess?" Duffy asked.   
"Take one for the team Duffy." Lawg hollered.


	2. Episode 17: The one with Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things happen, stuff be done. adventures have been had, and all the dipshits are still in space. come on dude, it's a ten page chapter, why do you need spoilers and summaries?

The Captain slid across the floor in his socks and waved an envelope in the air.   
"Mail!" he hollered as everyone but Roy scrambled to the picnic table.   
"Is it there, did we get it?" asked a rather frantic Duffy.   
"Yes, everyone take their results. Everyone said I was a dimwit, but who has the power now." he said snickering.   
"Dude, chill out…its just genealogy, it's mostly for fun." Marley yawned.   
"Hey, check it out…I'm 102 percent Irish." Duffy smirked. "I always was an overachiever."   
"Nifty, I'm mostly Delmarian as expected, but I'm 11 percent Screll. It's a subspecies known for their powerful stature and formidable constitution…I didn’t know that, obviously a recessive gene." he shrugged.   
"I'm a lot of stuff." said Nadine Newman, the newest crewman. A blonde ditsy type he found online at Nucru.com. Lawg obviously hired her for her lack of skills, lack of brains and lack of clothing coverage. She looked up and Lawg was staring blankly at his paper, frozen in a look of confused denial. "You okay?" she asked him, adjusting her very low top.   
"Find out you are only 90 percent Chaffee and ten percent potato?" joked Duffy.   
"No…I'm 50 percent Chaffee." he said looking heartbroken.   
"So, everyone's a little this and that, what is the other 50 percent…human, Space slug?" Joked Marley.   
"Human and …Hologram." he said setting the paper down and shuffling off. They all silently stared at each other. Duffy grabbed the paper and squinted carefully.   
"That doesn’t remotely make sense…holograms can't even mate!" she scoffed.   
"Only the upgraded ones." said Marley with a dark sense of seriousness, slowly grabbing the paper. "According to this DNA ancestry test, Captain Lawg's Dad was half hologram. Probably why he didn’t know him, not all ships have hologram projectors." he said looking grim.   
"Okay, ha, ha…hilarious. Seriously though, holograms can't mate, their just refracted light." Duffy pointed out.   
"Actually…" said the robot. "There have been rare cases of Holograms siring children. It is extremely uncommon but it has happened." he noted.   
"How…how can that possibly happen…please explain to me how projected light can impregnate anything…go ahead and break that down for me." Duffy said crossing her arms.   
"It is inappropriate to discuss mating rituals of other species, especially something as elusive as holograms." he said. Duffy followed Lawg, to be the voice of reason. 

"Hologram?" she barked at Lawg, as he soaked in the tub.  
"I don’t wanna discuss it right now." he said pouting.   
"You do realize this has zero scientific or logical reason to it. Clearly we just got scammed or someone is playing a joke. You can't have a DNA result of something without DNA, use your brain Lawg." she nagged. "Ancestry paperwork is easily flawed."  
"I have to find him." he muttered.   
"Yea don’t listen to me or anything, I'm just gonna go sabotage the ship…bye." she said walking off slowly with no response. He seemed really upset. Lawg wasn’t his usual self after that, moping around as he plotted the next mission. Marley entered the room to check on him as he did some basic math and gave himself a headache.   
"Hey Lawgman. got a heading?” Marley asked.   
"Yes I do, but it’s too far between fuel stops for the Taste-E. We can’t get there from here without a shortcut."   
"There's an Ubert drop-out point fairly close." he suggested.   
"I hate those things." Lawg scowled.   
"Beats drifting for a hundred years. Either that or scrub the mission." Marley noted.   
"Than Ubert it is." he said darkly. 

Marley watched the scanner as a massive black ship dropped out of hyperspace. He hailed them with a signal for a hitchhiking thumb and the giant cheese-wedge shaped behemoth activated a magnetic beam.   
"Alright, everybody hang on." he yawned as the Tast-E-Chill was slowly pulled into the cargo bay of the titanic vessel.   
"I hate these things." Duffy shivered.   
"What…Uberts?" asked Marley. "Why?"   
"We know so little about them, just creeps me out to be so submissive to a vessel this advanced. I mean what do we know about them?" she asked.   
"Taxi Company found a massive abandoned ship on autopilot for a thousand year loop, decided they were reliable ships and started using them to ferry smaller ships across the universe for profit…nothing too weird." he yawned.   
"That’s not the half of it. The first crew was found dead, like 40 people reduced to skeletons from centuries of isolation. These alien ships are so advanced we cant even steer them, nobody knows how they work, they just run by themselves and fuel automatically, automatically self diagnose and search for repair planets and we just decide it’s a good idea to dock with one when it drops out of hyperspace and use it as a taxi." she explained.   
"That’s why their so safe…ancient advanced technology and self reliance…a crew of ten can just live on one and ferry ships for supplies and make a living. They make predictable routs and drop out of hyperspace to fuel and supply themselves, any space pilots dream. If you can find ten to twenty people you like, you're set." he noted.   
"Yea but if something goes wrong and you cant even navigate or steer your ship, call me crazy but I trust my own skills and instinct over a mysterious ship that auto-everything's. I find it disturbing that something this advanced doesn’t need anyone to make it run or navigate, and we are just along for the ride, traveling hundreds of lightyears wherever it wants to go…totally unable to do anything if it decides to just hyper jump into the void and never stop again." she said as the bay doors closed.   
"You’re paranoid…Uberts are totally safe. These Ubert crews know what to do if anything malfunctions." Marley assured. As long as there are 2 or 3 mechanics aboard and some armed guards, everything is fine." 

Captain Lawg and the rest stood, plugging their noses, staring at a rather revolting pile of bones in a char that resembled a cockpit.   
"Of course I have been mistaken before." Marley said. "This guy does appear to be thoroughly decomposed." he added. Lawg heaved slightly.   
"So it's anonymous…back to the ship and call another Ubert." he said stifling his gag reflex.   
"Unanimous…also we can't…no way to stop this thing. You just ride it out till the next time it drops out of hyperspace." Duffy said staring at Marley.   
"Okay, this is a bad start…I'll give you that much…but someone has to be alive on this thing." Marley noted. Duffy smacked him in the arm.   
"No, nobody has to be at all…that’s why they freak me out. This ship could have ghosted the crew and been running for ten years without a living being on it before we go to the Ubert station and docked. That's my point." she said pausing to hear footsteps approaching. 

"Hello?" said a female voice.   
"Hello! Here in the sarcophagus room." hollered Duffy. A very timid young woman with black hair peeked from the doorway. She looked rather pale.   
"Oh what a relief, we thought the crew was all dead." Lawg laughed with a fake cover of terror.   
"No, not me…just everyone else." she said looking around like she was hearing voices. She began writing on the wall with something chalk-like that looked like advanced math. Mostly alien math, but some English.   
"How long have you been alone?" asked Duffy.   
"Three, maybe 4 years…I had friends for the first year but they didn’t make it." she said sniffing her emotions away and wiping her mistake away to correct her calculus.   
"Are you a mechanic?" asked Duffy.  
"Oh no, I don’t actually have a job. My dad was a politicians so I never needed to work."   
"Well shit-pickle." Duffy sighed.   
"I thought these things drop out of hyperspace every few days when they get near planets…that’s what they do right?" Lawg asked.   
"Oh I don’t know about that. The teleporter comes online every few days but it's been broken for 2 years. Every 7 months and 4 days it completes a cycle and drops out at a station, like you guys were at. This is the first time it has dropped out near a ship. I'm glad to see new faces. My name is Chloe." she said shaking Lawg's hand and giggling like a deranged schoolgirl with a crush.   
"So we are screwed, basically. Just stuck here for another 7 months till it drops out and we can leave?!" Uka exclaimed   
"How many of you are there?" asked Chloe.   
"Five if you count the new chick, and one robot that isn't working." Lawg figured.  
"You should draw straws now before we get too close to the red-giant." she said calmly.   
"And what does that mean in regular people speak?" asked Duffy.   
"Oh, we refuel in 3 days and 2 of you are going to have to die. I find it's easiest to draw straws instead of debate." she smiled, sniffing Lawg's com badge.   
"Oh shit." Marley said looking at the Panel.   
"What kind of shit?" asked Lawg.   
"She is dead on accurate. We are super-boned in 3.1 days. These ships are solar powered, they fly into stars and suck up star-junk as battery fuel, they are built to withstand the radiation and heat but this thing is badly damaged…like most of the ship is unshielded, so when we hit the corona, anyone not submerged in 5 million SPF sunblock is toast. Probably what crispified the pilot there." he noted. Chloe tilted her head.   
"He didn’t make it to the EVA suits. When we dive to scoop up star-fuel, the internal temperature reaches 400 degrees and remains that way for several minutes. Without an EVA suit, you will be cooked. We have 2 EVA suits, aside from mine." she said calmly.   
"And since I'm a bunny and Duffy is too big for the standards suit…pretty sure we just need one second to finish that simple math. Well, how do you wanna spend your last 3 days, Duff?" Marley asked.   
"I'm not just giving up like that…there has to be a shielded part of the ship somewhere." Duffy barked. Chloe calmly shrugged.   
"No, I've looked. I have sketched maps and in the last few years I haven't found any shielded spots…they're all damaged." she said resting her head on Lawg awkwardly.   
"Pretty friendly, aren't you?" he nervously grinned. "Probably pretty lonely from the whole thing."   
"I've always been a bit clingy…even before everyone died." she admitted.   
"See…this is the bullshit I'm talking about." said Marley angrily. "I get stranded with Duffy, both of us gonna cook to death because we can't fit into suits and what does Lawg find? Why only the loneliest space-babe ever with a spare EVA suit that fits them. So he gets to spend 3 days spooning some cute little crazy chick while we get to decide what marinade we want to be roasted with." he pouted.   
"What about escape pods?" asked Duffy. There was an immediate click and a hissing sound. Chloe looked up and got quiet.   
"Well, there was one left but dropping out in hyperspace could throw you anywhere in the galaxy."   
"Anyone seen Crewman Newman?" asked Duffy.   
"Damn, we just keep losing the hot ones." Lawg sighed.   
"Awe crap." Marley whined. "And she was wearing my new red shirt too. We need to stop giving random chicks my lucky red shirts. They just keep getting lost. First Tashi, wow Crewman Newman!" he sighed.   
"Well, now we don’t have to draw straws." grinned Chloe in a rather dark cynical optimism. 

"This sucks." Marley said shuffling beside Duffy. "Like on a scale of 1 to completely dicked…this is a 4."  
"Four dicked…that’s pretty bad. I was not prepared for the surplus dickage of this mission." Duffy yawned.   
"Been wandering the ship for almost 3 days, nothing close to a shielded room or a bunker…you'd think there would be some kind of panic room on a ship that dives into stars to fuel regularly. And Crewman Newman is nowhere to be seen."   
"Pretty sure it was intended to be all shielded…like with the energy shields."   
"Oh right…yea I forgot that was offline. That would probably help. At least we die heavily armed…these soldier corpses were armed like crazy. These little tiny rifles are awesome." he said waving his P90 around. "Last ten minutes we have…I'm gonna just shoot till it runs out, just for fun." he smirked.   
"And if you damage something?" she asked.   
"I'm sure the beautiful humans who get to survive happily in their EVA suits while we die horribly, can fix it. Those ass-hats aren't my problem. What are they gonna do…discipline my smoldering ashes?" he scoffed.   
"Well, since we are gonna be cooked alive…I’d rather be baked than boiled." she said removing a small joint from her pocket.   
"Let the pre-toasting toasting begin." he nodded. 

"Damn, I can't believe Duffy and Marley are just gonna die…and we can't do anything but mourn their deaths." Lawg sighed as he sat next to Chloe in the rear observation room couch.   
"It's a shame you only had one other normal sized human, and she had to be female. I was really hoping for a crew of men when your ship docked.   
"I mean the robot is male but he's gay and currently offline anyway." he shrugged.   
"Hey…if you have 2 more EVA suits…why are you alone and not with two other people?" he asked.   
"They guys sort of…had a disagreement about me. I tend to make the boys fight for some reason." She said calmly snuggling.   
"You are totally hot, so stranded on a ship with one other dude and you…kinda get why they would kill each other." He admitted.   
"Well, I mean one of them died that way." she said hesitantly. Lawg slowly faded to a look of worry.   
"So what did the other one die of exactly?" he asked with caution.   
"I have these…panic attacks?" she half asked with a look of shyness.   
"Oh how fortunate of me." he muttered quietly. “And would diving into a star be a stress trigger by any chance?” 

Duffy and Marley heard footsteps moving very quickly, full sprint. Lawg blew past them and smacked the door button as a menacing metallic hand stopped it from closing entirely.   
"What the ass?" asked Duffy. Marley lifted his gun and fired a burst, steering him in an arc, immediately having Lawg grab the gun away and start kicking the menacing hand to shove it back on its side of the door. The door closed as clawing ensued.   
"Please explain." said Duffy.   
"We can't shoot her…she could still go back to being hot again and I can't make out with a dead chick." he huffed, dropping to his knees and trying to catch his breath.   
"That was Chloe?" asked Duffy. Both she and Marley busted out laughing.   
"Why is that funny? I could have been killed, she could claw through that door and eat us all." he gasped.   
"Yea but were dead anyway in like 2 hours and we're completely stoned…so it's funny. Your space-slut is an alien monster…just like the shrimp." Marley wheezed as he slid down the wall and silently laughed so hard his eyes watered.   
"Not cool, we don’t mention that event…and if we survive this we wont mention this either." Lawg said racking the gun like a badass and fumbling the magazine as the bullets bounced out. He scrambled to reload it.   
"All your hoes try to eat you!" Duffy wheezed out before her laughter silenced her and both of them just sobbed in hysterical cackling while Lawg tried to familiarize himself with the tiny gun.   
"How do I put this on stun?" he asked.   
"You can't…it's bullets!" wheezed Marley.   
"Where is crewman Newman?” he asked.   
“Probably dead or hiding.”   
"Looks like we're in for a sleepless night." Lawg nervously said, clutching the tiny gun. 

Lawg jerked from his restless nap and accidentally fired a round as he flinched. Marley jumped from the bullet whizzing past him and bouncing off the console.   
"Damn Lawg, safety first, you could have killed one of us and robbed us of like 45 minutes of life…actually a bullet would be easier than…never mind, that got dark." he waved. Lawg shouldered his weapon and slowly opened the door to creep out. He slunk and slank down the hall, nervously pointing the gun and listening for footsteps but all he heard was a faint sobbing. He followed it and noticed Chloe sitting on the floor with a piece of chalk, sobbing away.   
"You hate me don’t you?" she asked.   
"No, no…I mean you did try and murder me but…water over the bridge." he scoffed.   
"You mean under the bridge?" she asked.   
"How would it be under it? Most ships have no plumbing running below the bridge for safety reasons." he noted.   
"It's just an old saying." she muttered.   
"Yea, that’s what I'm saying…so are you cool, or are you likely to get all mean again?" he asked.   
"I should have warned you. I got abducted and contaminated by aliens and now I turn into one periodically, makes it kinda hard to keep a steady boyfriend…that and all the men starving to death and being cooked by radiation didn’t help either." she said with a sniffle.   
"Yea that'll do it. Bout how long do you stay all cute and junk?" he asked, cautiously sitting beside her.   
"6 or 8 hours…unless I'm PMSing." she shrugged.   
"Oh good then we have time to relax. Don’t you worry, I have incredible luck and with me on the ship, everything will magically be fine in like…a day. We'll get your alien thing fixed and I'll take you to Alpha Primus." he said as if incentivising her to get well.   
"What's that?"   
"Alpha Primus…originally going to be a space colony extension for Earth way back before Earth exploded, but the ship intended to colonize it got lost. I guess that's what you get when you sent 6 people and a glitchy robot into space." he joked  
"Aren't we 4 people and a glitchy robot, dude?" asked Marley entering the room.   
"My point is that everyone was related, half of them were kids and they never made it there and the Earth had to sell the movie rights to pay for another ship, things got complicated and some old band bought the planet. Now it's just one hippy, party planet. Nothing but mushroom vomit and bong-shaped fruity drinks, hairy women and old classical music from the 1970's and 80's."  
"Music and hairy women?" asked Marley, suddenly perking up.   
"Not fury alien women, just hippies with no self respect or razors."  
"Hey Lawg." Marley noted. "Not to kill your vibe here but are you forgetting how me and Duffy are gonna be dead on less than an hour?"   
"Oh, yea I totally spaced that…" he said looking like he had an idea. “That’s it…space that!” h grinned.   
“Oh no, he has an idea. Those are always somehow worse.” Marley sighed.

"Lawg stood in front of the group and scribbled with the chalk, drawing a spaceship and a sun…poorly drawn on both accounts."  
"Lawg, your not mathing are you, because we had that discussion, you are not allowed to math." Marley reminded.   
"No it's so simple, no math needed. We wait till the sun is really close and then we blow you out the airlock." he said with a proud smile and a dramatic pause.  
"The shit kinda plan is that…kill me early?" Marley barked.   
"No, remember…you can survive in space for like ten minutes plus. Nowhere on this ship is safe, not even our crappy little ship because of the radiation and the heat, so even if you hide in the Taste-E-Chill, you still die from radiation, but not if we space you right before we get there and then scoop you up as we leave. See, we can't open the main doors to get the ship out but we can shut you in a bathroom and set off an explosion in the window, suck you right into space." he said drawing a stick bunny and an arrow.   
"You needed an illustration to say that bit?" Duffy asked, dryly.   
"I already had the chalk, I wanted to draw something."  
"Okay…" Marley said as if handing out doses of reality. "Even if I don’t die from the explosion or get torn apart on the jagged window, how do we know how long it takes to fuel, or if the ship will come back around close enough to snag me before it jumps to light speed?" he asked.   
"I have a feeling, a good one." Lawg explained. "Plus it's either that or you stay here and die really painfully and get reduced to rabbit stew."  
"A descent point. So how does Duffy not die in this plan?" he asked.   
"The fridge." he said waving his hands like he was presenting something other then a chalk square on the wall.   
"Did you get a contact high?" she asked. "The fridge? You think that crappy little fridge will protect me from 400 degree heat and radiation? I don’t care how cold it goes, its not gonna compensate for a damn solar flair!" Duffy barked.   
"It's lead lined…I saw it in a documentary, you can survive a nuclear explosion in these things. You just climb in and hold the door shut and hang on as it flings you a mile or two into the air…and this is way better cuz we know where you will end up…on the ship." he explained.   
"First off…whoever your source was, is an idiot…that flimsy thing cannot stand a nuclear bomb, plus even if it did shield you from the radiation and millions of degrees of heat, the G-force would render you into jelly. Therefore, that is just asinine. And its probably not even Lead lined, who the hell lines a fridge with lead?" she asked. 

Duffy sighed, rubbing her face as Lawg stood pointing to a big metal tag riveted to the side that said "Lead lined"   
"See?" he argued.   
"Why is there a fridge on an alien ship anyway and why…no I just quit." She said.  
"So…what do you think?" Lawg asked.   
"I think I'm gonna stuff you two twigs in the fridge, tear open both your suits and make one big EVA suit." she said pulling a beverage from the fridge and prying the cap off with her bare hands. There was no carbonated hiss.   
"Flat." she said taking the rest with her as she shuffled off. 

"Man, can't believe were gonna die in a shuttle craft." Duffy said burping and handing Marley a screwdriver.   
"I thought you said you had a plan?" he asked.   
"I do…and it's terrible. I'm attempting to use the ship's broken shield emitters to shield the shuttle, hopefully the relays wont burn out before we exit the star. Since it's an all day job and we have 12 minutes, we're probably gonna still die but I didn’t wanna seem pessimistic."  
"Oh good, we wouldn’t want me to know how screwed I am right now."   
Without warning, Lawg burst into the room and shut the door, just before something hit the other side.   
"She is insane, not only is she a liar and a tease, but she might be an alien, posing as human, rather than a human that turns alien." he huffed.   
"You think?" asked Duffy.   
"No I mean…she told me she was human and just had the occasional alien freak-out, but now I'm thinking she is mostly alien." he said putting on his EVA suit.   
"I got half a mind to hit you over the head and steal your suit." muttered Marley.   
"You don’t have to…I got 3 of them."   
"They won't fit us Lawg…that’s why we had this whole conversation."   
"Actually the waist is adjustable on Chloe's suit, so Duffy can probably fit, I decided since someone has to die, it may as well be the tease who is trying to kill me." he said tossing Duffy the suit.   
"That little toothpick told me her suit was a size small…nevermind, screw the shield thing, come on Marley." she said scooping him up and heading to the bathroom.   
"We really doing the thing with me being left in space?" he asked looking mortified.   
"Time's up, no choice." Duffy yelled over the alarms. 

Lawg's com beeped and he waited, hearing Chloe's voice.   
"Please don’t let me die." she begged.   
"You tried to kill me twice today and I didn’t even get second base…and you promised me third base and NOT killing me. You need help, Chloe, medical and mental, but I'm not letting you die. Just because I won't let you get me killed doesn’t mean I won't help you. How far are you from the shuttle bay?"   
"Three floors." she said nervously.   
"No time, no suit…you gotta trust me, Chloe…are you near the kitchen?" he asked.   
"Yes…why?" she asked, pausing "Oh come on, the lead fridge?" she asked.   
"It's the only way, pull the junk out of the fridge and seal yourself inside, I've seen it work before, if it can stop a nuclear blast then it can survive this." he insisted.   
"Okay, I trust you." she said rushing to the kitchen as the ship began to shutter and shake. She flung the shelf out and climbed in, yanking the door shut just as the room was flooded with radiation. She pulled it tightly and held on for her life. 

Duffy sealed Chloe’s adjust able suit and steadied her gun as Marley hung into something.   
“Sorry, buddy.” She shrugged, shooting the window out and sucking Marley out with it, closing the door behind her.   
"You guys really suuuuuuu"

Marley opened his eyes and gasped, sitting up and sneezing. He was back in the ship. Everyone seemed calm.   
"Did we get dead?" he wheezed as Duffy gave him a hug and Lawg finished kicking the door panel open. Duffy scooped Marley up and they headed to the kitchen.   
"See? The fridge is intact! Everyone is fine." Lawg beamed cheerfully, trying to open it. Duffy and Lawg got a grip on the door bracket and with a sticky popping sound it opened, sending them both staggering away as they coughed and gagged. Duffy waddled closer and made a face of disgust as the room filled with a pungent aroma.   
"Soooo…there went that theory. A lead lined fridge does, in fact NOT protect you from radiation. Good to know." Duffy shrugged.   
“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen…a Chloe-smoothie.” Lawg blinked.

The Tast-E-Chill drifted past a vantage point that dramatically resembled passing a camera drone. Lawg looked as depressed as ever, losing his Chloe.   
"Cheer up Lawg, we all survived yet another impossible scenario…except Crewman Newman and my lucky shirt, and also Chloe." Marley grinned.   
"This was a disaster." Lawg groaned.   
"We lose red-shirts all the time, that's why I buy them in bulk." Marley said opening the crate and retrieving another one. Besides, the Ubert got us really close to the destination you plotted. And yes, your inability to grasp what fiction is resulted in you falsely believing a fridge is a good bomb shelter, and instead… turned a homicidal alien chick into a Chloe-smoothie. There will be more floosies, there always have been, and most of them don’t try and kill you, so consider this a bullet dodged and be thankful the shield mods protected the ship from total destruction."   
"It's just not fair…" he said sadly. "I had something special, something so close to perfection at my fingertips and fricken space took it from me the moment I let my guard down. It's been weeks since we have seen a debris fiend of any kind, let alone another foot-bubbler." he sighed.   
"It'll be okay." Duffy said patting him and rolling her eyes. "At least you didn’t get eaten or liquefied like the other men who tried to bang Chloe, you got lucky after all." she said comfortingly.   
"Hey, your right…she did seem to get every guy around her killed, even the fat kid. I'm the only guy to ever get to 5th base with her and live to tell the tale…I have gone where no man has gone and survived. Luck of the Chaffee." he said posing.  
"Fifth base?" asked Duffy.   
"It's a basketball thing, It's halfway to Touchdown." he assured, as Marley inspected one of the strange orbs they stole from the ship.   
"I'm just stoked about these floaty things, you know how useful it is to have floating orb drones that can fly remotely, let alone act as a camera probe? And some of them have movies on them. I'd call this a successful run. Plus, we are halfway to Alpha Primus…and one step closer to finding Lawg's dad, and maybe some hairy stoner chicks who would find a talking bunny to be adorable. Plus since Chloe got turned to goop… we get the Ubert fee waved and compensation." he grinned. Lawg shrugged nonchalantly.   
"Yea but the rebates take forever to arrive." Duffy scoffed, stuffing the last gun in the locker.   
The Tast-E-Chill silently faded to black as another adventure drew to a close. The Ubert went into FTL, leaving behind just a trail of stardust and an emergency evac-pod spinning in the darkness, probably containing crewman Newman, who absolutely wont be back ever due to the odds and size of space.


	3. Episode 18: Daddy Issues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the thing that happens after chapter 17, but not quite to chapter 19

A derelict spaceship was slowly drifting in space, even more derelict than the Tast-E-Chill… totally shot to shit and rusted out really bad. It was illuminated as a small shuttle craft approached it. 

"So what are Space-maritime laws regarding this kinda thing?" asked Lawg, chewing on a candy bar as Duffy slowly backed the shuttle towards the junk-ship.  
"Neutral zone, any vessel adrift belongs to the crew unless the crew is all deceased, in which the ship becomes the property of anyone who claims it, registers the serial numbers and legally calls dibs." she said checking the sensors and the rear-view mirror as the back-up beeper beeped quietly into space.  
"The hell is a dib anyway?" he asked.  
"Dib registration office, on the home world of the Dib species. It's the place where claims are settled outside court. If the ship sent a distress beacon and can be confirmed, then we can't claim it, but if the ship has made no distress call and has no survivors, we can call dibs and let them know we claim the vessel as our own." she explained.  
"I call dibs on any weapons." he hollered.  
"It doesn’t work like that, you can’t just yell out something and claim it as yours like some college frat douchebag, you have to legally fill out dibs paperwork. Why does nobody understand that? Plus, since the shuttle is technically mine and that's what is doing the salvaging operation…it’s sort of already mine…and I already called dibs before you woke up."  
"When?" he asked.  
"I sent a signal to them as soon as we left the ship."  
"Whatever." he pouted.  
"Alright…gonna feel a little bump so hang on." she said nudging the joystick and rapidly pressing the A for action. "Docking port contact in 3, 2, 1…nope." she said.  
"Nope? What nope? What does nope even mean?"  
"We are not docked." she informed.  
"I felt the shutter." he noted.  
"You felt the docking port bump, but it's not sealed." she said punching keys and bringing up a camera view of the rear port. "See that big-ass open triangle that you could stuff your head into? That is what we call, NOT sealed…by like a really big margin." she said bluntly.  
"Well that's stupid, why doesn’t it fit?"  
"Not all docking ports fit all docking ports?" she said irritated.  
"I thought docking ports were universal?" he scoffed.  
"Yea by most known species, how the hell would a craft made by an unknown race possibly fit the universal gaskets?" she asked.  
"I dunno, it usually works on TV. No matter what ship you find, the same docking thingy always seals perfectly to anything that looks like an airlock. Nobody ever fails to make a connection, I think you dicked it up somehow." Lawg scolded

"Damnit Lawg, why is this so complicated, let me show you something." she said grabbing the screen and turning it to him.  
"That is a literal square peg and round hole situation, there is no way that two completely different shapes are going to seal at all, not even close, especially not air-tight." she argued.  
"What if you just kinda ram into it a little, just a few times to see if it goes?" he asked. She squinted, getting fairly impatient.  
"I suddenly understand why you're single, and also why there are numerous, evenly spaced little slots poked in the drywall near the TV corner of the den." she sighed.  
"I ran out of outlets, I thought it was worth trying. Is there any way to make the seal work?" he asked.  
"Explains your love-life too. It's gonna take a little while." she said opening the glovebox and getting tape and 2-part car-body filler. 

Lawg stood with his arms crossed, critical of the work he was looking at.  
"Looks terrible…you are cleaning this off when we get back to the ship, right?" he asked as he stared at the plate-sized wad of tape and patch-filler.  
"Just locate the alien ship's parking break so we can haul this thing to the dib-office." she sighed, hitting him in the chest with her flashlight, handing it to him intentionally hard.  
"Fine." he said dragging his feet in moody protest.  
"Pretty sure all ports fit all ports." he muttered under his breath. 

The SS Tast-E-Chill drifted with its cargo in tow, towards a very impressive space station, floating very closely to the pink and orange cloud layers of a gas giant.  
"Wow…a city in the clouds. That is really pretty." Lawg said with a romantic tone. Marley plopped down in the passenger seat.  
"Super Impractical too." He spoiled.  
"How so?" Lawg asked.  
"Sure it's visually interesting and semi-original so they get style points, but a floating city is a nightmare. One power failure and you just drop a million people into a gas giant. All dead, no hope, no landing systems."  
"I'm sure it has backup systems." he shrugged.  
"Probably…but think of the power it takes to keep that thing floating. They don’t just have big tanks of anti-gravity keeping it up. That’s a ton of resources and energy for mag-levitators and thrusters running 24/7 that can't shut down or fail or they all die. All that just for a nifty view. Rich people are dumb." he yawned.  
"I agree, but think of the atmosphere." he said losing himself in the colors.  
"It's all toxic gases, bro. Acid and chemicals that would melt you before you suffocated."  
"No I mean like the mood atmosphere. The vibe must be amazing. Infinite sunset and luxury pools with transparent fancy bottoms and rich women with transparent bikini bottoms on their rich, fancy bottoms. It must be one romantic love-party 24/7."  
"Yea, too bad we can't dock without docking codes. These uppity floating cities have super strict policies about poor bastards like us." Marley shrugged, scratching crud from his oversized ears.  
"We have class!" He objected, scratching his ass with a classy subtlety as he pretended to move some levers for some reason.  
"It's not a matter of class, and no, we don’t, we're basically dirty space hobos living in our van. It's about codes, not opinions." Marley informed.  
"But we have to dock...my father is on that floating posh-bucket."  
"Are you sure you read that thing right? This is a pretty fancy place, and holograms don’t have equal rights in this quadrant. It's pretty unlikely that a hologram would live here…or that a hologram could be someone's biological father but we already had that dumb conversation and you believe you won, despite making no sense."  
"Damn right I won. I read the paper twice before we got here. It says 23345 West Jupiter street, Atmosphere of Megas Prime. Only floating city they have here. He is a Hybrid Hologram Program, and a fairly successful doctor. 

"I thought Megas Prime sucked?" Marley asked as Duffy approached to see the city. She readied her plan-tablet for the mission.  
"No, your thinking of Alpha Primus." she corrected.  
"Right, Alpha Primus Sucks, I think that's their planet's official slogan, they chant it at every festival like they are proud of it. So, how can we dock, if we have no docking codes?" Marley asked.  
"Well." she pondered. "We could pretend to be a trash hauler and when the bottom opens to dump a load, we can fly a shuttle into the doors. From there we can just blend-in and find Lawg's impossible daddy."  
"How do we disguise as a trash-hauler?" Lawg asked.  
"Pretty sure if we just park there that it will be assumed, given what we have going on here. We're even hauling a salvaged ship behind us. Trust me…we look like trash already." she assured them.  
"Yea, I buy that." Marley nodded. "But we won't blend in very well in an ethnically un-diverse humanoid colony. I'm a bunny and you're…Duffy. Too bad Uka is gone again and the Robot is still damaged and flamboyant. This back and forth is confusing to everyone." He said dramatically looking directly at the robot.  
"What about me?" asked Lawg.  
"Well, your species is close enough to whitebread -human, but the moment you speak they're gonna know you are actually white-trash." Duffy reminded.  
"I am a slightly-Asian Chaffee, Half Hologram-Chaffee and 100 percent awesome. That's 200 percent, if that doesn’t qualify then what does?" he protested.  
"Yea, statements like that is what I am talking about. Maybe not announcing you are a quasi bi-racial humanoid species that runs on booze and hookers while we're on the rich-people planet would be nice." suggested Duffy.  
"Good point." he admitted. "So we will sneak in at 03:00 hours."  
"Why 03:00?" asked Duffy  
"The night shift…less people around." he smirked.  
"This is space…its always night." Duffy sighed.  
"Yea, but who the hell is up at 3 AM?" he shrugged.  
"That's 3 am our time, it means nothing to them. They may not even have 24-hour days. This is space, artificial lighting and whatever schedule you want is whatever shift." she reminded.  
"Exactly…and what schedule I want is night shift, because less people are out at night. I understand that there is no literal day and night in space."  
"Do you? Do you really grasp that, Lawg?" asked Duffy with skepticism.  
"Whatever time-zone they are on, we do the math and then whatever 3AM is for them, we ride." he said striking a pose.  
"No, you do not in fact grasp this. There is no late shift in space, there could be A and B, or 1 and 2 and 3, or Delta and Gamma. It's space. Time is made-up and they would likely have people out at all times. There is no 3AM, or graveyard shift on a damn space-station." Duffy protested. He clicked the radio on and after a few seconds of alien music the announcer began talking.  
"Gooood morning Megas Prime. It's another sunsetty day in the Federal Union Empire, and I'm your ultra Caucasian weatherman Bert Thorp. It's 8:42 PM and WKTFM will be switching to slow-jams in an hour, so you can rock your night away in style." he hollered as smooth alien Jazz played.  
"Feel kinda dumb now don’t you Duff?" Lawg grinned. She looked more alarmed than ashamed, like proven wrong was secondary to a bad epiphany she just had.  
"I was not aware that Megas Prime was a Federal planet." she sighed angrily.  
"Yea the Federal Planets do weird stuff, everything is all military and proper and they still use the time from like 500 years ago when they had boats. It's hilariously obsolete." Marley said, kicking back.  
"No wonder it's so uptight. Military controlled and upper-class income. I wonder if you get to pick what color of stick you have to keep in your ass all the time or if it comes in standard Federal Grey." she sighed.  
"Okay, so new plan. I blend in and you guys stay on the ship." Lawg suggested as the others nodded.  
"He's gonna get us killed somehow." Marley said shaking his head. 

As the Tast-E-Chill hovered up into the garbage bubble on the bottom of the station, an ominous blue glow surrounded it. The com system automatically turned on and a rather proper grey-haired alien woman in uniform presented a very plastic smile.  
"Captain…Bob…Limpett of the SS-Trash hauler reporting for duty." Lawg blurted with a look of panic.  
"We're not scheduled for dumping until 11:00." she smiled.  
"Sometimes you gotta take a dump unexpectedly and it’s good to have us on stand-by. We're just a bit early, so can we chill here until then?" he asked.  
"Certainly, feel free to wait until the bubble bay until then, and security will scan you for clearance." she said.  
"Oh, yea about that…" he paused. "Can I use your restroom first and then come back, ours is broken and I've been holding it for hours." he bluffed.  
"I'm sorry. Nobody is allowed on the settlement without scanning procedures and clearance. They will be here at the scheduled time of 11:00 and you can use the restrooms before you leave. Until then you must remain in the bubble bay." she said.  
"That’s over two hours, I really gotta go. Things could get serious in here. What if I need a dump before you guys take one on us?"  
"I'm sorry, that isn't my problem." she smiled smugly.  
"Look, I get it. It's not your space-station and you're just following the rules and whatnot but think of the human-compassion for your fellow man, we got no bathroom and its 2 days to the repair station, I've been holding it all day."  
"What's human compassion?" she asked.  
"Oh right…not human, damnit. Megas Primian compassion. If I shit my pants, they won't let me on the station to sign for the trash and then you got a ship sitting in your bubble bay and the paperwork would take hours. Don’t you wanna go home to your family on time, or do you wanna deny another living being a bathroom and stay overtime filling out papers all night over some dumb rule…I'll even buy something." he offered. She rolled her eyes.  
"This isn't a gas station, it’s a space station."  
"200 credits." he offered.  
"I can let you use the one here in the office." she nodded. The screen went black.  
"Oh great…so you can get 50 feet inside and call your dad from the shitter?" Duffy said.  
"I have a Plan. I distract her while you guys head to the control bay. I sneak out of the bathroom through the window and leave this behind." he said hitting the button on a small battery powered fart-sound machine. "I swipe the clearance codes from another ship and send them to you, then go find my father. You guys just walk back out with the codes like you were already cleared." he smiled.  
"That’s…actually not a terrible plan." Duffy said with a surprised look. "I'm amazed you thought of it."  
"I saw it in an old movie called "Home Alone 12, alone in space Las Vegas."  
"Aaaaaaaand we're back to stupidity." Marley sighed. 

Lawg quietly fell from the bathroom window, landing on his feet and faded from frantic stumbling flail, to casual walk. He seemed to blend in reasonably well as he strutted into the public streets, getting a few looks of smugness from his peasant attire but generating no calls to emergency services. 

Duffy and Marley cartoonishly tiptoed through the ship repair-bay for the trash haulers, looking for one with no guards and an open door.  
"I wouldn’t have thought they would guard the trash so heavily. We'll never get docking codes and papers." he whispered.  
"Well we can't just crash the system and deactivate the shield grid." Duffy sighed.  
"Why not?" he asked.  
"Well, it would be incredibly bad on the grid and cost millions to fix, plus it's probably heavier guarded than the trash." She noted.  
"But theoretically, if we just crashed the grid, we could escape?" he asked.  
"And then we would be wanted for millions in property damage and shot on sight if we ever returned to a Federal Empire station or planet." she warned.  
"So?" he asked. "Screw them."  
"You think Lawg will be thrilled that he found his father and we screwed up a simple snatch and grab job that put his name and face on an arrest warrant in the very station where his father lives?" she asked.  
"Oh right, and he’ll write us out of the will…and the robot would get the ship when he dies. Valid point. We could just wait till he screws something up himself and then by crashing the system we would be cleaning the mess, not creating it." he justified.  
"Not bad. He is bound to get himself in deep shit in the next hour, and in the chaos we can snag the codes and be out of here." she smiled, giving him a fist bump. 

Captain Lawg nervously reached the top floor of the apartment complex, peering out over the glorious lights and sounds of the cheaper side of town from the slightly wobbly fire-escape-ish platform. He checked his papers and knocked on the door. The door opened a moment later with a grumble and an irritated sigh.  
"What?" said the voice.  
"I am here to see Doctor Benny Lawgins." said Captain Lawg.  
"That's me. You better get inside, it’s almost night and this part of town is a real danger zone." replied a gruff, balding man with a thin ring of frizzy grey fuzz in a rather monk-esque pattern. His 5:00 shadow suggested he was not in the most presentable condition.  
"I've come a long way to meet you, is it possible shake your hand?"  
"Despite my instincts to shut the door I guess I can give you that much…why do I feel like I am about to have a really bad day?" Benny asked.  
"Can holograms shake hands?" Lawg asked.  
"Oh, I see." she smiled smugly. "You must be familiar with my Generation 1 Holograms. Clearly they are so seamlessly flawless at mimicking human personality that you have mistaken me for one of them. I assure you, I am the real Benny Lawgins…in the flesh." he nodded, beaming with pride.  
"Aren't you at least half hologram yourself?" asked the Captain, clueless. Benny faded to a look of utter confusion.  
"No…what does that even mean, half-hologram?" he scoffed.  
"But it says right here on this DNA result page: Benny D. Lawgins, hybrid Hologram Program/ Chafee." he pointed out.  
"I guess this is going to take a minute, step inside…you are familiar with typos, are you not?" he asked.  
"I read it dozens of times; I don’t think I read it wrong."  
"I'll take that as a no. A typo is an error in a typed word, often resulting in confusing or comical miscommunication. Even if you read it correctly 50 times, sometimes errors get printed out from the source. I'm not a Hybrid Hologram Program, I'm a Hybrid Hologram Programmer. I design Hybrid Holograms for a living. The slash is to separate occupation from species. I am 100 percent human and a damn good Holographic Programmer." he explained.  
"Wait, so that means I'm not part hologram? I'm 100 percent Chaffee!?" Lawg Beamed.  
"What? Obviously not, you're half human, or about 45 percent human. There is no such thing as part hologram, that’s just dumb. How would a hologram reproduce, they're just refracted light? Even a hybrid model with a physical skeleton and built-in emitter, technically could have sex, but with no DNA or biological components, just never mind, holograms can't reproduce with organic life. And why would that affect you and your…" he said examining the paper. "son-of-a-spacebitch." she sighed.  
"I'm your son." Lawg said, grinning like a child at Christmas.  
"Yea, I just got that…hence the exclaim of anxiety. Marla Smith, no wonder you ended up so dense. I knew dating a space-pirate was a bad idea, but you don’t see many Chafee so I figured, what could it hurt?" he sighed, looking up at Captain Lawg scratching awkwardly at his ass. "And now it hurts me greatly." he added. Lawg jumped as another Benny came around the corner, younger and still bald.  
"Is that my brother?" he gasped.  
"No, it’s a hologram…we just went through this. The holograms look like me and they don’t age." he said looking frustrated. "My god you are stupid."  
"Why would you make them look like you?" Lawg asked.  
"Because I wanted some kind of legacy I could be proud of. It’s the closest to a son I ever had. Plus they look like me so they are sexy as hell and awesome" he said awkwardly.  
"I get it now…you weren't aware that I was even born…that’s why you were never there. You felt something but you didn’t know where to look and I grew up with my grandfather, who was crazy, and probably didn’t even know who my real father was." Lawg said feeling a bit of comfort as he wiped his brow.  
"Wrong again, dip-shit. After a knocked up your mother and vowed to never go out again, I had you med-scanned hoping you were actually someone else's kid. Luck of the Chafee failed me twice that year, first the condom, then the paternity test came up positive and with it showed you have a predicted IQ between 60 and 70…obviously from your mother's side. Needless to say I have a reputation as a brilliant scientist and successfully covered the fact that I am an eighth Chaffee myself for almost 35 years, so having a dumb-ass half/chaf son put a dampener on that situation. So, I left you with your mother and resumed my career." he said, pausing as Lawg waited for an ending.  
"That's it? I was too dumb so you threw me away?" Lawg asked.  
"I didn’t throw you away, I did what was best for both of us. My career would be over, we would go broke, a Chafee child raised in public schools by a single father? I may be brilliant and talented, but I'm not a miracle worker, and I'm not exactly loving. I have had 2 house plants run away. I'm eccentric and crude, grouchy and antisocial, you think I would have done better than a loving mother with a starship and a universe of possibilities?" he asked.  
"Mom left me with my crazy Grandpa and went to space-Vegas…never came back. Grew up on a freighter never knowing my parents." he said dryly.  
"Bummer, guess you did kinda get the old boot-to-the-ass, didn’t you?" Benny pondered. "At least you had a job and got to travel, see the universe." he pointed out.  
"Same 11 month cargo run back and forth for 15 years. Only Docked to re-supply. Just empty space and a crazy old man who the crew felt sorry for enough to keep him onboard, even though he was clearly unfit to captain a ship. Weren't even any women on the ship except Bertha and that is a stretch of the gender lines." he said coldly.  
"So life didn’t even use a clean boot, hu? That sucks kid. So what do you want from me? Money?" he asked.  
"Sure, I could use…I mean no. NO! I wanted the truth, I maybe even hoped to find a father who was glad to find out I existed and want some kind of relationship."  
"What are you, 12? Life is full of disappointments, isn't it? So you aren't here to claim any child-support money or weasel your way into some inheritance plot…Was there anything else I missed?" he asked.  
"Nope." he said coldly, turning and shuffling away. Benny looked almost sorry for a moment, feeling for the first time like he owed him something more then just a Lawg monologue.  
"Wait…hold up Kid." he hollered. Captain Lawg turned around and shuffled back to see what the old bugger had to say.  
"Can I tell you a secret? Can you promise not to tell anyone about this?" he asked.  
"Sure, dad."  
"Don’t call me dad. So, here is the thing… My real name is Jimmy Jackson." he said looking ashamed.  
"I thought your name was Benny." he said looking confused.  
"Shut up dumb-ass and try to listen, you might learn something. I'll keep this stupid-simple. You seem simply stupid. Your Father was a Captain of a Space-cruiser. He died in a combat mission while your mom was pregnant. He had a pretty solid reputation and I was broke and high for a week so I stole his identity. Your real father was a war hero and a great man and I stole his name long enough to start a business and feed my own family. I had 6 kids and a wife to feed and Badass Benny was a good friend of mine, I knew he would have given me anything I needed if I asked when he was alive, so I borrowed his name after he died." he said pausing. "Your Father is dead, but he died protecting his people and he would be proud that you became a Captain as well. I'm just an old Mutt with a lot of regret. My family left me, and now I sit in my apartment and write programs all day to stave off depression." he finished.  
"Wow…so my father may have really wanted me after all. I knew I was from a Lawg line of Greatness." he said smiling.  
"Take this." he said handing him something from his desk drawer. "It was your father's watch. It meant the world to him and it belongs to his son now. I never deserved it, always kept it in case your mother ever returned. Now if you excuse me, I have programming to do, so get the hell out of my doorway before someone gets the wrong idea." he said as Lawg strutted away proudly. Benny shut the door and sat down, checking computer files.  
"Gullible idiot." Benny scoffed as the hologram of Benny brought him a virtual sandwich. His hologram looked concerned.  
"Why did you lie to him?" it asked.  
"He had a shit life, the truth is no better. I got no room in my life for a son, let alone a brainless son. He was better off without me then, and he is better off without me still. Now he will live his life far away from me, believing his father was a hero and we'll both be happier men." Benny said firing up his laptop.  
"Where did the watch come from?" asked the hologram.  
"Found it on the sidewalk last week, looked expensive. I was gonna pawn it but it didn’t work and it would cost me more to fix than it's worth."  
"You are a deceitful old man." the hologram said bluntly.  
"Thank you, now go get my damn slippers and a fresh cup of coffee. 

Laser blasts flew overhead as Duffy and Marley ran from the guards.  
Marley came to a frantic stop as they reached the nearest door opening, where the room became a hollow vertical shaft like an inside-out skyscraper. A consistent wind whistled below as he peeked out over the edge of the border path. A very spindly metal tube reached to the center where a platform was sitting, wobbling ever-so-slightly in the distance. The shaft-room descended downward into a fading blackness as the tiny lights of the numerous floors turned into vague perspective lines that converged into infinity.  
"What the hell is this shit?" Marley asked.  
"Some kind of exhaust system maybe." Duffy said.  
"Why? Why would there be an exhaust system anywhere near the foot paths of residential people? This is just a 40 fadjillian foot high drop to nothing. Why would this exist?" he asked.  
"Are you afraid of heights?" she asked. He turned slowly.  
"No, I am afraid of stupididy that can kill me. This is the perfect example of lethal stupidity. I thought it was the location of the grid power supply, but now I see it is a badly designed bridge to nowhere." he corrected.  
"Just go." Duffy growled.  
"No, this is just unsafely bad architecture. Sure, it looks cool and interesting but it has no purpose, this is a really significant sized empty space in a space-station that allows people to fall for what seems like forever…where does it go? What is the reason they needed an infinity tube of death? Why is it not enclosed to prevent people from falling off?" he complained  
"It has rails." she noted.  
"RAILS? OH DANDY…IT HAS RAILS! Well how fortunate that the Fadjillian mile high drop into infinite void comes with a flimsy aluminum pipe on either side, with a polished finish for a perfect grip in case you slipped on the smooth metal floor panels and needed to grab for your life. This should be completely enclosed in something, I don’t even see the point of putting a panel anywhere near the hollow tube of infinite vertigo, let alone on a heavy platform, precociously extended to the exact center of the death-tube via a single wobbly extension. And lucky us, It’s accessible only from an 80 meter long, slightly round walking path with 2 flimsy frigging rails attached every 9 feet. I could stuff a cow through this gap, who designed this shit?" Marley ranted.  
"Calm down little buddy." she encouraged, firing back as guards closed in.  
"No, I will not calm down. This is stupid. Why does every space-station and creepy base have to have a giant cylindrical chamber that drops off to blackness and death, and if this is somehow necessary, why must it be so open and badly marked? I'm 4 foot tall, there are children on this station, I am the height of the flimsy rails that would probably break if ever actually used. It's not even welded good…look at this shit." he pointed out as lasers flew over his head.  
"You're examining welds while we are being shot at!?" Duffy asked, firing wildly.  
"This is a spot-weld, its not a structural weld, it just holds the thing in place so someone can weld it properly. They didn’t even finish welding it! How can I feel safe walking on a pipe that was made by someone who decided the rails didn’t need to be welded out?"  
"That’s nice, but we are being shot at by security, so normally I would agree with you, but if we don’t shut down the shielding we can't be teleported out and they will murder us with death and lasers." she reminded.  
"How much ammo is left in that thing?" he asked.  
"It's a laser, I can't check the magazine. It runs out when the battery does. It has 1 out of 5 blinky bars left and I have no idea how full it was when I picked it up off the guy I knocked out. "Do you know how many shots 1 blinky bar represents?"  
"Damnit. They have the technology to build a city that floats but they can't put a counter on a gun or a freaking weld on a rail? What kind of shitty space-station is this?"  
"Federal Owned Property, what do you expect? They paint everything white and use good lighting to distract from cheap corner-cutting and mistakes. Nobody thinks about it if it looks cool. Those wall covers are probably made of recycled trash bags and under those nice, matte grey panels…probably a rat-nest of zippy ties and taped wires, missing bolts and budget sensors."  
"Oh great, now I really wanna go out on the flimsy pipe into the void…thank you for giving me the optimistic confidence I needed to feel safe." he barked.  
"Stop wasting time, we have been talking for like 8 minutes and pretty soon the guards will figure out they can approach us while we are monologing. Just go out there before I shoot you in the fury ass and tell Lawg it was the Feds…mkay?" she said with a sarcastic smirk.  
"You suck." he squinted as he tried not to look down. The laser fire continued as he nervously centered himself down the walkway, barely touching the rails on either side of his head as he stared at his footing and focused on his breathing. 

Lawg noticed the alarms going off and used the distraction to dart past the desk receptionist blocking his way to the ship. He grabbed a com and dialed out.  
"Hey guys, I assume these alarms are your doing, did you get the codes?" he asked.  
"NO! WE DO NOT HAVE CODES!" hollered Marley.  
"Geese, calm down. No rush." he scoffed.  
"I am not calming down, Lawg. I am stuck on a wobbly platform with lasers flying everywhere, flimsily held above an infinite drop to space-hell by a SINGLE STRAND OF VERMICELLI!!!" Marley hollered.  
""I'll teleport you out." he replied.  
"NO. Do not teleport us yet." replied Duffy. "I need to finish disabling the shields or we will be teleporting into a locked hangar bay with no way out."  
"Teleport me and then let Duffy finish." Marley insisted.  
"No, don’t teleport him. The teleport coils need like 10 minutes between teleports and I don’t wanna get stuck here. Give me another 45 seconds." she barked, shooting the panel off and rummaging through wires.  
"We'll be dead in 45 seconds; they're almost across the vermicelli bridge." Marley reminded.  
"Oh, screw it." she said turning a dial on the gun and jamming it in the panel.  
"Teleport us now." she said  
"Coils need to warm up first." Lawg said watching the lights slowly dim.  
"Shit!" Duffy barked, yanking the gun back out. "I already set it to explode." she added, looking around and flinging it towards the guards. The explosion rattled the platform and the handrails fell off.  
"See? Shitty handrails." Marley barked. The platform began to sag and creak as the flimsy bridge crumpled and bent. They de-materialized as the platform dropped suddenly with a snap, crashing and exploding for literally no reason.  
"Grid's down, activating the emergency boosters." Lawg said, punching it and ramming the doors open as the ship zipped into the blackness of space. Marley and Duffy staggered out of the Teleporter.  
"Oh hey, you guys made it. Good stuff." he yawned, sipping from his umbrella-drink. Duffy stormed off to go take a nap as Marley staggered to the cockpit.  
"Are they following us?" he asked.  
"Nope, I knocked out the locator dish on the way out. Happy accident, really. Luck of the Chafee. One hundred percent Chafee." he smiled.  
"That’s conveniently conclusive to wrap up the day. Find your dad?" he asked, shakily lighting up a joint from the glove-box.  
"No, but I found answers and that is the next best thing. He was a hero and a great Captain, and at least I know that now. Plus I got his old pocket watch." he smiled.  
"Very interesting, I'm gonna go take a shower and cry a lil." Marley said staggering off.  
"Not a bad day." Lawg said putting on his unnecessary sunglasses and putting his feet up. "Not a bad day at all." he added.


	4. Episode 19: A bastard and a fish tank.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> your shoe's untied.

"What the duck shit is that thing?" asked Marley, staring at a very vividly white ship with a strange logo on the side.   
"It's a Gigolo bus!" beamed Lawg.   
"Like a man-whore transportation device?" he asked.   
"No, that's something totally different. A Gigolo is a groupie that follows this ancient Earth band, Clown Posey."   
"That can't be accurate, Lawg. I'm no historian, but that has to be one of your mistakes. You'd have to be touched in the head to name your band after both clowns and flowers. And the logo is so badly worn it could say practically anything. All I can make out is FAMILY VAN. Lamest name ever. Regardless of the history, why are we looking at a tour bus?"   
"Because it's a piece of history." Lawg smiled.   
"Oh it's a piece of something, I'll give you that. You didn’t pay money for this did you?" asked Marley.   
"Practically nothing, the scrap yard almost gave it away…now the labor cost on the other hand, was a little high." he said hesitantly.   
"Labor…good grief you are not fixing it up to fly. Please tell me you didn’t sell the Taste-E-Chill to fix up this tour bus." Marley said looking alarmed.   
"Of course not. Sell the Taste-E? That's Hennessey!" he scoffed.   
"No that would be Heresy, and where did you get the money, and where is the Taste-E?" Marley asked.   
"So remember the bobble heads? They sold for 9,600 Credz."  
"Holy crap, Lawg. So we have 2 ships now? I mean that's a great sale, especially for someone like you…so special. But we can't crew 2 ships."   
"And that's the best part. We don’t have to. Introducing…The Sneaky Bastard" he said whipping around and holding out his arms to reveal the same ship that Marley was already looking at.   
"You already showed me the bus, dipshit…what's the surprise?"   
"Oh right, follow me." he corrected, leading him to the rear entrance. They stepped inside and Marley rubbed his eyes in disbelief.   
"You moved all the crap from the Taste-E into the…we seriously calling it the Sneaky Bastard?" he asked. "Family Van" was almost better."  
"Yes we are…and no I didn’t, and no it's not! The bus was basically garbage."  
"Hence the whole 'you bought it' part." Marley sighed.  
"Exactly. I couldn’t part with the Taste-E, but it was on its last leg. Needed new plating, structural supports were termite infested."  
"You gotta use Vacuum rated lumber, dude. I know it's 3 bucks more a board but you save money in time when you don’t have to repair it as often… or die." Marley noted, looking around at the familiarity.   
"I know, I know. Irregardlessly, the ship was unsound and about to burst open at the slightest thump, but the internal systems worked and it felt like home." Lawg said.   
"I see where this is going. You just gutted the tour bus and parked the Taste-E inside. Used the hull and the boosters and pretty much used the bus as a body kit. My question is why…why a bus? Why not spend that money and the labor cost jamming it in there when you could have just had the Taste-E rebuilt?" he asked Lawg.   
"Glad you asked. Not only is this a priceless piece of-"  
"Garbage." Marley finished.   
"No." Lawg corrected.  
"Excrement?"  
"History…but it's also armored like crazy." Lawg bragged.   
"Armored?" Marley asked dumbfounded. "Who armors a tour bus? Where they that famous?" he asked.   
"No, but apparently they just really annoyed people. Just truly horrible music. Every single one of them was murdered one by one, so they just kept reinforcing the tour busses. It's basically an impenetrable car garage for a ship…except it's propelled by the ship." he smiled happily.   
"Still can't believe you got it welded up and stable…who did the work?"   
"Mechanic on Beta Theta Phi."   
"The Frat planet with the telepaths?"   
"Yep." he said handing him the tablet with the work receipts.   
"Connie Spartan. Woof, that is one ugly woman. How did you convince her to give you that good of a price?" Marley asked. Log blinked silently.   
"I have seen things, we won't speak of these things. Anyway here is the new cargo bay." He diverted.   
"You cut the top off to fit in the bus…at least we don’t have a canvas sunroof anymore.   
"Oh it's still there, it's just has an outer hull over it now. Nice thick polymer window glass." he said admiring the old umbrella roof.   
"Pretty convenient that it just happens to be the same size as the ship and just enough larger to slip over it like a glove." Marley noted.   
"Super convenient, unbelievable odds, really. It's highly unrealistic how well it fits, but here it is." Lawg said scrolling through the repairs.   
"We are going to do a new paint job though, right?" he asked.   
"I almost finished the paint job." Lawg said looking confused.   
"What paint did you use?" Marley asked, almost scolding.   
"The right kind. Lawg insisted.   
"Quadrutanium?" Marley asked crossing his arms with skepticism.   
"Y…yea." Lawg bluffed.   
"You didn’t use that shaker can stuff, did you?"   
"Of course not. These cans were already here." he lied.   
"Alright, it's not my problem." he shrugged.   
"But just out of curiosity, because I love learning new things and whatnot…why is Quadrutanium paint so important?" Lawg asked.   
"It's more durable. Regular shaker can enamel doesn’t handle the rigors of space very well. Just gonna be re-painting a lot to cover the scuffs and burns is all. But you used the right stuff apparently so it should hold up forever." he said slightly smirking.   
"Exactly…" he bluffed as they boarded the ship to start take-off procedures and go get Duffy from her 3 day vacation on Horizon 4. 

The bay door opened and Duffy strolled to the docking clamps, stopping and looking around for the Taste-E. She walked right past the Sneaky Bastard and paused for a moment.   
"Late as usual, should have guessed." she shrugged as she continued looking for the old pink ship. Her com phone bleeped.   
"Welcome back Duffy, climb aboard the ship." chuckled Lawg.   
"Please tell me the surprise is that the Taste-E-Chill now has functional invisibility cloaking and bedrooms?" she asked feeling skeptical. "And a hot, shirtless skinny robot butler."  
"Even better." he giggled like a schoolgirl, honking the horn. Some kind of horrible rap-like noise echoed from the subwoofers of the nearby shiny silver ship.   
"We got a new ship?" she asked excitedly. She rushed to the doors and passed through an airlock that was new and polished on outside, Taste-E pink on the inside and transitioned with sheet metal and tape. She stepped into the normal looking Taste-E-Chill B-deck and stood lost and confused. She even felt the slight sag of the cardboard floors under her feet where the water damage had accumulated.   
"It finally happened." she said looking terrified. "All that radiation gave me a brain tumor and it's started pressing against something important." she said rubbing her eyes.   
"All aboard the Sneaky Bastard!" Lawg hollered excitedly.   
"Lawg, what have you done?" she asked in disbelief.   
"I heard you liked ships, so I put a ship in a ship!" he grinned.   
"We already had a shuttle pod inside another larger shuttle pod welded to the old ship. So you put 2 ships in a ship, one that already contains a ship. This is madness" she said as Lawg's brain started to hurt. She rubbed her eyes again.   
"It's like that old Earth show where that Pimp Mechanic finds out people like things so they put things in things for them and make their ride better!" he smiled.   
"How is this better? It's just more things in things. Adding more things inside the same thing does make it inherently better!" she argued.   
"Sure it does…a ship in a ship has twice the air seals, twice the hull armor, twice as many thrusters and fuel tanks." he listed  
"Twice the weight, twice the fuses to replace, half the mileage and half the top speed." she listed.  
"You mathed wrong Duffalo, we're doubleing everything so that's twice the weight and fuses, but also twice the speed and double the mileage. Its two ships, Duffy.   
"That's not how math works. Are you seriously claiming you understand math better than me…or literally anyone?" she asked.   
"No." he admitted like a sad child, looking sad.   
"This is a mess. It would take at least 1 extra crewman just to clean it and keep track of the spliced systems."   
"Then we just got lucky, because we have also doubled the crew."   
"Lawg, you hired 3 extra people? We can't even afford to get the robot out of pawn, let alone hire new people."  
"Firstly I hired 2 extra people. Double the crew is 4. Captain doesn’t count. You can't double the Captain, that's just mayhem. You can't even follow orders from one of me. Gotta draw the line somewhere Duff."  
"That's still a reduction in payment if we divide it among more people." 

"Twice the ships means twice the cargo, so it evens out. How do you think huge ships can afford to have more crew, Duffy?"   
"Because they have more cargo space and better systems. We have the same cargo bay as before it's just covered by another hull. It's better protected now but it's not actually bigger." she explained.  
"We can cram stuff between the hulls." he shrugged   
"You can't access the space to fill it. The crawlspace doors are barely big enough for Marley. If the cargo was sand or liquid then we may have an extra 20 percent cargo space. Who the hell did you even hire that would want to go with us losers?" she asked.   
"I made an online dating profile. Apparently there are lots of starship-groupers. People will sign up for anything given enough propaganda. It’s a big universe and sadistically speaking, there had to be at least 5. Obviously I eliminated the guys and chose based on profile pics." he deduced.   
"So you hired eye-candy." she sighed.   
"That's Offensive, Duffy. They are people…I mean they're aliens so maybe they aren't people, I don’t know the political correctness. And no I didn’t just pick the cutest ones…I narrowed it down to 2 positions we needed and who was best qualified…and then I picked 1 of those based on cuteness, the other for better reasons. Cuteness was secondary, Duff, I thought you'd be proud of me. See this one?" he said holding up a tablet with a gorgeous blonde. "I eliminated her because she has no experience in space and she has no job skills. And this one has a criminal record for murder, still super hot, I didn’t pick her either."   
"Okay I get it, you put function before horniness…just barely, but it's an improvement. So what did we get?"   
"I decided we needed a tactical advisor or security to make sure I don’t get the ship stolen, someone who could fly a ship and interface, someone who knew more languages than just English and Spanish, and obviously desperation was a plus. I narrowed it to these two." 

Lawg strutted back and forth as the two new chicks stood for examination and introductions.   
"Alright ladies, Congratulations, you are the new recruits and this is the new ship. I am your Captain, Commodor or Admiral Captain William T Lawg of the SS Tast-E-Chill inside of the new SS Sneaky Bastard. You are here because you are the best of the best of the only two remotely descent enough chicks who replied to the job listing that I could stand looking at…mostly you. For the first 2 weeks you will be considered probational interns." A green hand raised as the 5 foot nothing olive-drab chick smiled. She bared her oddly silver teeth like a person who had never smiled before and was overcompensating after a few hours practice in a mirror. "Green chick, you have a question?" he asked.   
"Bellybutton!" she yelled. The other filled in the explanation.   
"Exploration and tactical specialist Defiant Ohmarez Menace of Left Circle." Said her friend as green chick smiled the same eerily serial-killer smile.

"The what now?" He blinked. Duffy sighed and discreetly stepped in.   
"That's a Fogrey name. She graduated from Fogrey academy. The Fogrey have a very complicated system of naming based on their mother's full name, a given title, an earned nickname and a chosen descriptive additive. She would go my "Menace" for short unless you chose a new nickname for her." Duffy explained "Please don’t." she added.   
"They let the Captain choose their name?" he asked.   
"If you wish to, as the highest ranking elder of the home…in this case the ship and crew, you have the right to change its name to a chosen one.   
"Fogrey arent green, are they?" Lawg asked Duffy.   
"Well obviously she's not native, but she has a diploma from there. I admit it's slightly sketchy, but it checks out."   
"And I get to name her." He nodded.   
"Please just use Menace, that was it's Academy nickname. They take their names very emotionally and you suck at naming anything." she pleaded.   
"Do not. I came up with the Sneaky Bastard." he argued.   
"That's exactly my point. Any name you choose, it will have to use from this point on until leaving this crew and they regard names with a very sentimental value."   
"You keep saying IT instead of HER…" He whispered.   
"That's because they have 5 genders on Fogrey and I have no idea how touchy they are about the details or which one it, or she is. The medical paper is marked with a question mark. So even they don’t know."   
"You mean she's not a chick?" Lawg whispered discreetly.   
"I don’t know, I didn’t lift the tail!" Duffy snipped sarcastically.   
"She looks like a chick…or is that just me?" he muttered, now unsure. The green crewman just stood there still smiling that toothy grin with eyes as wide they could go.  
"Well it's a woman's wig on its head and the petite figure probably just triggered your lady-radar. It could be female, or something close, I don’t know." Duffy muttered.   
"Is she on something? Drugs?" he added. "Or just angry and hungry?"   
"Wait a second…" Duffy said looking at the profile pic. "Lawg…tell me you didn’t hire Menace for the reason I think you did." she scolded.   
"What? I thought she, hopefully a she, had good qualifications." he shrugged looking guilty.   
"Dropped out of academy, hit and miss scores and behavioral misconduct. Only scored high in flight-school where it got a GED. Oh my, what flying colors she seems to have not passed with. So with terrible credentials and the fact that you can't even definitively tell if it’s a female, your motives seem to be rather vague…explain." Duffy said crossing her arms. Lawg blinked rapidly. Menace crossed her arms too.   
"… I believe in second chances?" he said softly. She raised her hand to hit him and he winced, spilling the real motives. "Okay, I believe in second hot-tubs." he admitted.   
"What does that mean?" she said retracting her wallop.   
"As part of an unidentified species, questionables have federally observed rights, namely amphibious personal quarters. By officially hiring one, the Federal Empire not only provides but pays for an emergency floatation pod." he said scrolling his tablet to what appeared to be a really fancy hot-tub. "but also this Digital temperature control, gravity buffer, self cleaning filtration system." he smiled.   
"So you hired a second government paid hot-tub that comes with an extra crewman?" she sighed rubbing her temples to remove the urge to hit him again.   
"I believe in equality and redundancy, and also equality."   
"Shut up. So why did you hire the bug? Does she come with a federally funded massage chair?" Duffy asked.   
"Bug…what do you mean bug?" he asked. "And when you said SHE, you were literal, right?"   
"She is half Vaath. All Vaath are female."   
"Nice." he smiled.   
"And also giant bugs." she added.   
"Gross." he sighed. "She doesn’t look very bug-like though, maybe she took after her father." he said scoping her out.   
"They genetically engineer them to look more human, or technically whatever species they are integrating in with." Duffy informed.   
"Bummer. So how buggy do you think she is? Does she have a Thor-ass?" he cringed.   
"It's Thorax…a thor-ass is what you're gonna have after I'm done kicking it." she groaned.   
"I'm just being fair. I don’t want her first experience on a Chafee vessel to be one where she is treated unfairly as an outsider. She deserves the right to be treated like an equal and exactly as I would treat another Chafee or human or whatever."  
"So you're going to inappropriately flirt with her hoping for a score?" she said dryly.   
"Exactly. It's called equality, Duffy." he whispered as he approached the Vaath female. "And what is your name, madam?" he said suavely.   
"Vaath Hybrid Pilot Vs2-33." she replied robotically.   
"You don’t have a name?" he asked.   
"I was not assigned a name. Names are inefficient and pointless. As the pilot of this ship I suggest shortening to Pilot" she said still looking forward with her red eyes and green pupils remaining laser-focused forward.   
"Can't just call our pilot, Pilot…that's lazy even for me. What if we encounter another pilot? That's just confusing. What if we rotate shift duties? It could happen, it's not like you are biologically bound to the ship or anything. Menace can fly too, so we can't trade names. Would we just call you Janitor if we needed you to clean a coolant spill?"   
"If it is necessary." she said emotionlessly.   
"Awe, hell no. Everyone needs a name. What about chick-Buddha?" he asked.   
"If you wish, Captain." she nodded.   
"NO, NO NO NO." Duffy butted in. "No way is that even close to politically correct, and why would that even come to mind? She's slim, alien and probably atheist." Duffy noted.   
"Cuz of her Asian vibe and really big earlobes." he shrugged.   
"Damnit, Lawg you cant just generalize that kind of crap. Just call her Vee or something for short."   
"Hey, I kinda like that, pretty name, also the first letter of Vaath. She's crewman number 5 so the Ramen Numerals thing works." he grinned.   
"I'm frankly shocked you know any numerals or understand how to spell." Duffy said sitting down as Marley scanned them both for abnormalities or hidden weapons. His scanner beeped.   
"We got weapon alarms, Lawg." he said scanning Menace.   
"She got a nail file in her purse?" Lawg said as Duffy shook her head and gave up. "Well, we have to pick some kind of pronoun, kinda insulting to call her an IT like she's some kind of robot. We definitely arent having a crewman we call IT when we just bought a clown-themed body kit. That's just asking for murders. If she prefers to be called a boy then we'll go with that, otherwise I'm rounding up to chick. Any objection?" he asked "her". Menace shook her head no and kept smiling.   
"See, she's fine with it. No harm. I just thought she had a more feminine quality to her is all. So about that weapon scan, what does she have…eyebrow tweezers?"   
"Three daggers, a stun baton, brass knuckles and a grenade." Marley listed. Lawg stood still as a tree. He paused, mouth open and a little intimidated.   
"Hu…" he huffed, purely to break the silence. "Might be where the Menace name originated. You realize you can't wear all that in the hot-tubs?" he joked.   
"TWEEZERS!" she shouted, sending him back in alarm.   
"Yea she doesn’t speak English either, that's in the file." Marley informed, checking the tablet. "She understands some of it, but she doesn’t speak anything but random shouts and the occasional whisper, all in random words and phrases she learns along the way."  
"HANDS!" she smiled, booping Lawg on the nose and running away like a game.   
"Okay so we got a hot tub that comes with a free mandatory child-frog. I'm considering it." Lawg nodded. "For now."

Marley sat beside Vee as she stared blankly at the console.   
"Pretty confusing stuff isnt it?" he said striking conversation.   
"No." she replied coldly.   
"Just looked kinda glazed over. figured you were a little unfamiliar with the old crappy style manual controls." he smiled.   
"The layout has been scanned and analyzed. Course trajectory is accurately vectored. No additional movement is required." she noted.   
"Sometimes I like to do barrel rolls, people expect that kinda thing when you are space-bunny piloting a ship. I don’t know why, but everyone keeps yelling DO A BARREL ROLL!! So I oblige. Breaks up the monotony."   
"Aileron Roll." she corrected.   
"Alrighty then, so no fun flying. So what do you do for fun other than doing super rigid flying."   
"I do not require fun." she replied.   
"What?! Cool looking chick like you? You can't tell me you have no personality or fun of any kind. You got cool tats and badass gauged out ears. You can't tell me there is no story behind those." he insisted.   
"The epidermal markings are external indicators of bio-molecular stability to indicate chemical imbalances. The ear enhancements are acoustic sensory augmentations to allow low-light echolocation." she informed.   
"Fairly short story I guess. You just went with flowers because you liked them?" he pried.   
"The artwork to camouflage the display lighting bands were selected at random from a database. The functional modifications are merely decorated to blend in socially within an Eridani populated quadrant."   
"Exciting stuff. So what sort of cool stuff did you bring with you?" he asked. She handed him a hefty pack as if to allow him to just rummage. He hesitantly removed one of numerous small red rocks, dull blood-red and chalky like sandstone, all uniform and perfect squares.   
"Iron Oxide." he scanned "Something to remind you of home or are they some kind of religious thing you use to decorate your quarters?" he asked trying to stay intrigued. She turned to him slowly and without emotion, taking one of the rocks and placing it in her mouth. She took a swig of water from her bottle and began chewing as she turned her head forward again.   
"Ya eat them, of course you do. You eat wet, mushy dirt-rocks and don’t believe in fun or barrel rolls."  
"Aileron Rolls." she corrected.   
"Kinda thinking I should have hung out with the other one…probably more exciting than sitting here silently with Pebbles." he muttered to himself. 

The Cargo bay filled with a high pitch scream. A very girly cry of anguish rattled the polycarbonate view ports as the sound of discomfort shifted higher in pitch.   
"It's so friggin cold!" screamed Lawg trying to claw his way up the side of the new hot tub. Menace looked partially alarmed and partially entertained.   
"Pants? Menace insisted playfully, jabbing him with her foot as he frantically scaled the enclosure wall and dropped to the floor, scampering desperately for a towel.   
"Having fun in the new tub?" asked Duffy, trying not to laugh as Lawg violently shivered and grabbed a nearby rug, rotating himself into a shaking Lawg roll.   
"The hot-tub is broken, it's super cold. We need a new heating coil." he chattered.   
"Lawg, she's obviously a cold blooded amphibian. This isn't a hot-tub, it's a hydration chamber for sleeping. It's kept at 2 Degrees Celsius."   
"Why?" he shivered.   
"Because it's designed to keep an alien, who's species lives in water under a crust of frozen ice, comfortable enough to hydrate and sleep. It's not designed to keep a dimwit Captain water-Lawged and toasty…ya ass." she scoffed.   
"FUN!" yelled Menace, splashing and twirling.   
"It's horrible. There was a fish in the tank." he insisted, looking back to confirm and seeing Menace submerged in the tank, frozen like a deer in the headlights with a dead fish between her teeth like she had been caught in the cookie jar. She smiled and waved at him.   
"You hired a bug and a fish in an attempt to get laid and a new hot tub." she pointed out. What made you think this would be a good idea?"  
"And neither of those worked and now I wish I had gone with the dumb hot ones. See what being a good guy and believing in second chances got me, Duffy?"   
"Diversity, culture, a tremendously overqualified pilot and a free aquarium?" She smirked.   
"Yea that actually doesn’t sound too bad. Can we get a sushi bar and write it off on our taxes now?"   
"If there is a way to exploit the government for stupid accommodations, I'm sure you'll find a way to accomplish it through blind luck and half-assed determination." she assured.   
"Damn skippy." 

Lawg Yawned and violently smacked his police-box alarm clock, leaning up and clicking the overhead light on so he could adjust his eyes before opening the bunk door and encountering the normal brightness of the ship. He slid open his bunk and stepped out into his slippers as he stretched.   
"Awe, yea man. That new hull plating really makes for a quieter cruising speed." he yawned as he grabbed a bottle of breakfast and headed for the den. He staggered sleepishly onto the heavily worn salmon-colored carpet, and stopped short as he noticed the Den already occupied. Lawg cautiously circled the couch, where Menace was sitting and watching the TV, Marley sitting beside her with a look of frozen fear on his face as she proceeded to pet his furry ears and chuckle discreetly at the shows on the screen.   
"Please help me." Marley asked softly.   
"So…you made yourself at home, I see. And I guess you two are getting along well." Lawg said with a tone of confused alarm.   
"Tinydelmarian." She grinned, munching on some popcorn as she dipped it in a bowl of orange juice. Marley's eyes glazed over in desperation.   
"She just sat down and started petting me. I tried to leave but she snarled and I think she may eat me if I make her mad." Marley whispered.   
"Menace…I think the space-bunny needs to go now. How about I trade you for some nice tequila?" he said as if to a child who wouldn’t give up her toy. She let him go and took the bottle, taking a swig and spitting it out immediately. Her eyes widened and she climbed the couch, leaping at Lawg and rearing back with the bottle to whack him.   
"Menace, Calm down!" hollered Duffy. "It's not poison, he was just offering you some of his food. Drink the shitty tequila, Captain."   
"But I don’t have any fizzy lime-aide." he pouted.  
"Drink it or she will kill you." Duffy insisted. Lawg grabbed the bottle and chugged about a third of it, giving a big "AH" of refreshment. Menace went from psychopathic murder mode to cheerfully enthusiastic in zero seconds flat. Returning to her soggy popcorn.   
"What the hell?" he silently mouthed to Duffy.  
"You traded her something she liked for something that burns and tasted terrible. She probably thought you were tricking her." She explained.   
"She held me hostage." Marley insisted.   
"Did you try getting up and leaving?" Duffy asked.   
"Once…she snarled at me."   
"Snarling could be a mild insisting gesture in their culture. She basically just pouted and patted the seat for you to stay and you sat back down. She probably thinks you are a kid given your size." Duffy explained.   
"HEY!!" he said looking offended. "Okay yea, I am pretty adorable."   
"So how do we communicate to her that he's just a runt and she scared him half to death, without being offensive?" Lawg asked.   
"You could try just saying what you just said, given that she is an intelligent species who knows English, I assume, given her graduation." Duffy said crossing her arms. Lawg turned to see Menace hanging over the back of the couch, listening to the conversation. He locked eyes and she went from a wide-eyed stare to a cheesy and still fairly creepy smile, bearing her pointy, metallic grey teeth. 

"My bad." Marley nodded.   
"I think there is a lesson here we can agree on about cultures and assumptions." Duffy said looking to Lawg.   
"Aquariums are not worth the hassle?" he half asked. "Or never give a fish alcohol…I got confused." Lawg moped.   
"Don’t judge other species without trying to establish a dialogue." Duffy hinted.   
"She does kinda give off a murdery vibe." he whispered.   
"Her species could be apex-predators, like sharks or humming birds." Marley read off the tablet. Lawg squinted in ignorant fascination.   
He squinted further as he noticed them moving oddly fast. "Hey, what's that shiny stuff going past the viewports?"   
"Paint dust." Duffy informed. "Some idiot must have used regular paint on the hull. Light speed will eat that cheap paint up in a day." she scoffed.   
"Those cheap, sneaky bastards." he sighed to himself. "Someone get the touchup paint before the Bastard logo wears off and we have to introduce ourselves as the "Family Van."   
"PAINT!" yelled Menace, clapping to herself.


	5. Episode Numero Twenty-o: Doughnuts and Sour Diesel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i am dipping my potatoes in crushed Vicodin, and you cannot stop me.

Captain William T Lawg, man of dignity, stood patiently as his toaster pastry popped up and flopped to the counter among the lint and space-ants. With a 5 o'clock shadow and a distinct wobble he slowly lifted I to his face.   
"Man, screw big crews. Some of the best teams in space had like 4 people. Sonny and Cher and the other two, Hansen and Crunchy, and that whiney kid with the helmet." Lawg said tripping soberly over his own shoes. "And that one crew with the big blue bitch and the 2 humans and the frog." he said crashing through the chairs as Menace watched him with an entertained look, munching on some sardines as she sat perched on the counter. Duffy dodged a staggering Lawg as she fumbled to the next room.   
"God, he is really sober this time. We need to find a space-station or a Quiky Moon with booze, before it gets to be a medical emergency" Duffy sighed.   
"We passed medical emergency an hour ago." said Marley. "Cuz it is going to require surgery to get my foot from his ass if he breaks one of my DVD box sets. He's lucky he's the Captain or I'd have already done it for cracking the case to my National Geographic collection."  
"Is that just your version of porn?" Duffy asked.   
"Attention crew." Said Vee, tapping into the ships coms with her neuro implants. "We have an object on sensors within scanning range."   
"Space station?" asked Marley. Vee brought it up on display as Duffy studied the shape.   
"Nope…planet. Artificial I'm guessing. Someone abandoned it, you can tell from the graffiti." she pointed out on the big screen. "It’s a doughnut planet, shaped like a huge doughnut." Duffy added.  
"She's better us off without her!" hollered Lawg, scooting to the captain's chair: a swivel chair they slapped with a sticker reading "Captain" after the other one caught fire from sparklers he hid in the back.   
"He's not handling the loss very well is he?" asked Duffy.   
"Of Uka's abandonment or the dumb chick who got killed on the Ubert because of him?" asked Marley.   
"Either, he mourns the loss of poon like most people mourn family deaths." She nodded.   
"Doughnut!" Menace hollered buckling her seatbelt. Lawg climbed the chair and fastened his seatbelt-belt to itself, not realizing it provided no safety being attached to his own pants.   
"Lawg, you need to get a real seatbelt." Duffy said strapping in.   
"I got this." he pointed.  
"Lawg, seatbelts attach to the seat. In its current state, it's basically just a belt."  
"I know…its portable and therefore efficient." he argued.   
Suddenly there was a jolt and the ship stopped. Unfortunately Lawg didn’t. He met the front console with enough force to nearly split a Lawg, caving in the plastic cover. 

"Unbelieveable, luck of the friggin whatever." grumbled Duffy as Lawg lead the away-team of literally everyone except the pilot. Marley just grinned.   
"I know, apparently it's a real thing. He is 4 hours from fatal sobriety, takes a sudden blow to the head and gets knocked straight again. Luckily that hidden stash of boxed wine stuffed in the secret spare-glove box softened the blow. Who knew wine came in soft milar pouches wrapped in cardboard." he said munching on some fruit chews. "Those boxes saved his life twice in a row.   
"Must be some fancy stuff,” Lawg smiled. All the alcohol I've ever seen was in disposable glass bottles. Glass is garbage, they make spaceships out of milar.”  
“He must have robbed someone wealthy." Duffy said. "Château de back-porch, 2009…you know they were fancy if they had 2 porches on their ship. You don’t get access to those unless you are loaded or Lawg." she added. A rather odd yellow-colored alien with a head like a trash barrel waddled towards them.   
"Hello, Welcome to Jason, but everyone calls it the doughnut planet…or Jason. My name is Berry." he smiled dimly.   
"I am very sorry for that." whispered Lawg, shaking his tiny hand.   
"I see you ran into the Flark net. Pesky Flarks keep nesting in the doughnut-hole." Berry said.   
"Pretty serious net for some doughnut-hole birds." Lawg noted, looking up at the hazy cloud of net.   
"Yea they are a real problem. They fly up where the gravity peters-out and just have a party." Berry grinned.   
"I think Lawg has had a few peter-out parties in zero G. Muttered Duffy. Berry blinked as the joke missed him, more for his lack of brains than his stature.   
"Yea, it’s a real big issue when they get enough mass up there." said Berry. "The big ball of sticks and crap starts to spin, and it’s a game of scat-roulette where it's gonna re-enter. Ever had flaming bird-shit re-enter an atmosphere and hit your windshield at terminal velocity?" he asked Lawg.   
"…yes" he nodded.   
"Happened to bob last week…nice funeral though, he had money." shrugged Berry.   
"Do you need a lift off this doughnut, we heard the planet was abandoned but we picked up your life signs on the scanner. Noted Marley  
"Hell no, I love it here." Berry grinned. Menace grabbed his hand and shook enthusiastically.   
"MENACE!" she yelled in an alarmingly friendly manner. Marley cut in.   
"Isn't the outside of the ring uninhabitable and the red giant sun is expanding and going to cook everything?" asked Marley.   
"Awe, that nonsense. All the rich people lived on the outside and took off when it got warm. Gooood riddance to them. Sure it gets a little warm but the inside of the hole is pleasant and will be fine for another thousand years or better. When the hole gets uncomfortable we have preparations for that.   
"Coolant gel?" asked Marley with a smile. "Always cools the doughnut hole."   
"Nope, free energy cooling fan, we're gonna install in the middle." smiled Berry.   
"How does that help?" asked Marley.   
"Well, them smarty scientists thought we dumb farmers couldn’t invent things, but we managed. Big fan in the hole. Space air conditioning. What is colder than space?"   
"Space popsicles?" pondered Lawg.   
"Looked for that." Berry sighed.   
"And?" Lawg pried.   
"Couldn’t find any. So we figured why not just stick a big fan in the center where everything floats, pull in the space-cold and keep cool for another thousand years." he grinned proudly.   
"Fans have to turn in order to work." noted Lawg   
"Right you are…but the planet rotates, so we just gonna let the fan sit still and turn around it." Berry grinned.   
"Inspiring." said Lawg with a bow of respect.   
"Nope, no intelligent life on this one." said Duffy, shuffling away.   
"ROBOT!" bragged Menace, chewing on some cardboard she found.   
"We have a broken robot, actually." Marley noted. "You wouldn’t happen to have spare parts for trade?" he asked. 

"Of course not. Were Catholic, We don’t believe in artificial life. No robot parts here." Smiled Berry.   
"Any booze we can buy for the trip back?" asked Lawg  
"Of course…we're Catholic." he grinned.   
"What's the supply situation, any major exports?" asked Duff.   
"Doughnuts mostly. This is a doughnut planet." Berry shrugged.   
"A literal doughnut planet…is it made of doughnuts?" asked Lawg. Duffy rolled her eyes and walked away. Berry looked insulted.   
"No…that’s just dumb. Why would you even ask that? You think we got a molten jelly-filled core beneath the crust?" he joked, patting Lawg and shuffling to the factory.   
"I heard of a disk planet in the Hut system with hot-dog filled crust." Lawg Mentioned.   
"Na, that’s just a myth. Nobody is THAT redneck." Berry scoffed. Plus even children know you can't have a flat planet…Gravity collapses it. Jelly filled planet is scientifically possible but they're rare, but not a flat-planet." he scoffed.   
"It did seem kinda stupid, even for me." Lawg pondered. 

"So here we have the dough plant." Berry hollered as the entered the massive room where dozens of little yellow critters worked away making dough.   
"Wow, lotta dough. You must have some crazy huge fryers." Lawg sighed.   
"Actually no. This is the Vega system, we make only organic Vegan Doughnuts, naturally baked without extra fat." he bragged.   
"So… really terrible doughnuts then." Lawg sighed in several disappointments.   
"Ooooh yea. Dry as a warm popcorn fart. But hipsters keep buying them so we keep making them. We save money on ovens cuz we just ship them to the hot side and the radiation bakes them in-rout to the delivery pickup point." berry said. "You want a sample?" he added.   
"Not anymore I don’t." Lawg whispered to himself.   
"We can't stand them either. Tell you the truth, I hate these things. This is my home, and I won't ever leave it, but the damn Zaycron Fleet treats us like free labor and won’t let us make the good stuff anymore."  
"Nugheads…I hate those guys." Marley said kicking air.   
"They bully us around for our supplies and we can't escape or fight back. Were just farmers, with basic doughnut making gear and communion wine."   
"Cant you stand up to them, fight back a little?" Marley suggested.   
"These aren't your average murderous Zaycron, they're rogue Zaycron. Their leader, Diesel Kush, is one harsh greasy bastard. His ship, the Sativa, is fortified heavier than our wine. He sneaks up on you and lays you flat out before you know what happened and he sticks around till all the food is gone." Berry sighed. Lawg slammed his fist on the nearby table in disgust.   
"No, no more chickening out. I have had it to the last nerve with the Nug-heads picking on everyone, mostly us but also them. We're gonna smoke those smelly bastards for once." Lawg said suddenly defiant.   
"Lawg…are you insane? We can't even win a fight against a bird net." Marley warned and reminded.   
"No, I saw this on a DVD. If you arm the farmers and get them motivates, use some holograms and fancy trickery, you can handle even the strongest opponent. All it takes to beat them is one good fight, and they will leave for good and never return again." he insisted.   
"Why not? Wouldn’t they just send 2 or 3 ships next time and kill everyone? They wouldn’t even have to land, just drop a big rock from orbit. Why would humiliating them once be a good thing?" asked Marley.   
"They're just bullies. You have to show them you aren't afraid." he insisted.   
"Wow, you hit your head really hard didn’t you? They're not older kids on the playground; they are an armed civilization with a reputation for drug and weapons trading. Nugheads have killed entire planets just for their Cheese Crunchies before." Duffy noted.  
"We have Roy." Lawg smiled. And we have an armored ship with a new tactical advisor." He said pointing to the green chick secretly eating raw dough.   
"Lawg…we have a moderately armored tour bus and a robot that won't even turn on half the time, like today. 

"Captain Ominous is watching everything we do. He has an entire stealth-ship. All we have to do is tell him Duffy is in danger, and we're good." Lawg explained. Marley shook his head.   
"I am standing right here, dip-shit. We have open com badges wired to the robot. If he's watching than you just you just told him the plan…and it’s a stupid plan. Why are you suddenly the big hero? How hard did you hit your head?" Marley asked.   
"So if we cant take them on our own…we cut a deal with the Bloodstorm." Lawg smirked darkly. "They love the sweets, even bad doughnuts are worth something to them. Tell them they are health rations, have you ever had a Vegan doughnut? Tell me they don’t taste like emergency protein rations." he reasoned. Marley shrugged.   
"I can't believe I agree with that. The Bloodstorm seems heavier armed every time we encounter it and Captain RAGE would come here just to hurt Lawg, so if the deal goes bad we get to watch you get thrashed and that's fun." said Marley  
"Hey!" hollered Lawg. Duffy checked the GPS.   
"This is on the Border of Left Twick territory. The Twicks have been a target for the Nug-heads for some time. They designed their Crave missiles Specifically for their shields. I bet the Bloodstorm would do some serious damage to a Zaycron ship before we hauled ass out of here. Even a ship like Captain Diesel's Sativa Class cruiser wouldn’t be unstoppable against a heavy Twick Craving. Whoever wins would be damaged enough to allow us to get away, 2 birds with one stone." suggested Duffy.   
"The birds won't help us; they are too dumb to avoid a floating net." Lawg scoffed.   
"Lawg…WE were too dumb to avoid the net. And if either of them comes out undamaged, they'll kill us all. What if the Twick are traveling in larger packs in this sector?” Marley asked.   
"Twicks always travel in twos, unless it’s a family pack…and no ship with family members would follow a cruiser into combat. I think Rage and the Bloodstorm can smoke out Diesel and his Sativa. Don’t they have vaporizers?" Lawg asked.   
"They have lots of weaponry, vaporizers, grinders, even smoke bombs!" Marley noted. "My question is why? Why are we suddenly not chicken-shits like usual and why are we defending a planet with one guy on it we barely know, and risking our lives?" Marley asked.   
"Because it's the right thing to do…because my father would have done it." he beamed proudly, lifting a knee as if it was perched triumphantly on a rock or something. Marley face-palmed as his furry hand muted the sound.   
"Lawg, We don’t even know who your father was, it was probably the jerk who gave you the watch, not some Captain Hero war vet, who died gloriously defending his people. If the hologram programmer actually WAS your dad, that watch story sounds like an excuse to make you go away happy and not bother him again."  
"But the watch." Lawg argued. Duffy butted in.   
"Lawg it's plastic, they have them everywhere in candy-crane machines across the galaxy. It's not old and passed down, it was made last year in Delmar 2, says that on the back. If he lied about the watch he probably lied about the whole thing. Even if your dad was a hero…clearly you didn’t inherit anything hero-ish from him or any great Captain skills. Hell, you thought the chaff launcher was full of wheat. You nearly burned down space station Beta 22 when the orphanage asked for food donations. The point is: every time you try and do anything selfless you jack-up the whole thing really bad. The luck of the Chafee doesn’t work when you do hero stuff, only when you act like a Chafee…lazy selfish, impulsive and random!" She explained. 

"Then let's fight like Chafee." he insisted.   
"badly, and end up getting dead?' Marley answered.   
"That's a good point." Muttered Lawg. Menace wandered to the discussion holding a pile of parts.   
"BOMB!" she grinned. Lawg looked alarmed.   
"Is that just a coincidental word she used or did she really just build a bomb?" he asked. She squinted and made a "boom" gesture and a puffed her cheeks.   
"You are terrifying." Marley muttered. Hey, wait a second…" Marley said having an epiphany. "The ship is totally new and painted up on the outside, and we have 2 new crewmen neither the Zacron nor the Twick ever met. We could lure them here and then just hide in the back. They wouldn’t start attacking a totally unknown ship and the scans won't penetrate the armor so they won't detect anyone but the bridge crew."  
"That's brilliant." Lawg whispered. "I'm glad I thought of it."  
"We just gotta do some crew-improv wardrobe swapping and convince them both we're someone they don’t wanna kill, get them to turn one each other." he grinned.   
"I want no part of this." smiled Berry. 

The blackness of space was suddenly filled with a large ship dropping out of FTL. The ship hailed the SS Sneaky Bastard as Lawg and Marley hid behind the consoles and Duffy sat in the Captain's chair wearing a fur coat and Marley's Delmarian Bounty-hunter mask.   
"This is Captain Diesel Kush of the SS Sativa, Zaycron Alliance. This planet is claimed by the Alliance, and you are invading our territory." said the biggest Nug they ever saw.   
"This is Captain Snow of the SS… Sneaky Bastard." said Duffy with an eye roll and a heavily modulated robot voice. "We encountered a spatial disturbance and made orbit for repairs. We will be on our way in 40 minutes." she said confidently.   
"Unacceptable, you have 30." he snipped.   
"Thirty-five and I throw in a bear claw." She negotiated. He paused for a moment.   
"I do like bear-claws. You have 35 minutes to make repairs." he said signing off. 

"Good work, everyone." Duffy said removing the coat and mask as Lawg and Marley stammered to their seats. The coms came back on as they got comfortable. Lawg took his seat and hailed the Bloodstorm.   
"I AM RAAAGE!!!" answered Rage.  
"We know that already. The point is that we have your money, with interest, and you can pick it up now if you promise not to kill us and everything is settled. "He suggested.   
"How much interest?" RAAAGE asked.   
"Hella-interest, plus you can have the robot." he bluffed. Rage looked rather intrigued.   
"So you pay us all they money you owe, plus this “hella interest” and we keep your robot, and then we just let you go, no more bad blood or further transactions?" he asked.   
"Sounds good." Lawg nodded.   
"I agree. This 'hella' better be significant. Send me your location."  
"It's easy to spot, we're near the doughnut planet. You can't miss us." he smirked, signing out. Rage chuckled maniacally to his second in command.   
"Lawg is gullible." Rage smiled as his lieutenant approached.   
"He will attempt to run or swindle us as before." He reminded.   
"Of course he will, for the last time. We take the offer, then we shoot out their power generator and life supports. When everyone is dead we take the loot and sell the Taste-E-Chill as scrap. I don’t care about the money. This is about honor and vengeance." Rage said under his breath 

Lawg broke communications and buckled his seatbelt-belt diving behind the console as Duffy put her helmet back on. Vee waited until the Sativa hailed them.   
"Captain Snow…Sneaky Bastard." replied Duffy in a rush.   
"Greetings, Bastards” smoldered Diesel “…there is a ship approaching this sector. Are they your backup?" scolded Captain Diesel.   
"No, we have no allies or weapons. If there is a ship approaching it doesn’t concern us. We are still dealing with repairs." Bluffed Duff  
"If they are not your reinforcements…then you wouldn’t mind us firing on them." he said with a challenge. The ship drifted below the horizon of the doughnut's hole, blocking the ship from visual range.   
"Not at all, not our business or problem. We would even be grateful if you're firing on them gave us more time to fix our engines. By all means, fire away. We don’t care." Duffy shrugged. The coms beeped and she put them on hold.   
"I AM RAAAAGE!"  
"Oh blow it out your lizard ass, we heard you the first time." Duffy replied, tossing her mask aside quickly, as Lawg scrambled to the front.   
"You lied to us, you are not orbiting the doughnut planet." he hissed angrily.   
"Wrong again Twicky McGee, we just got ourselves a new ship…a Zaycron Battle cruiser. This time if you decided to kill us…you'll have to blast through our energy shields." she said hanging up and grabbing her mask as Lawg ducked under the console and Menace popped up and pretended to be hitting console panels. "Hail the Nugs." she ordered though her deeply modulated mask voice. The screen came on.   
"Captain Diesel," Duffy said. "we have detected weapons charging. We were told we would have 35 minutes and our time isn't up. I thought you were a Zaycron of your word." she said boldly.   
"We haven't powered weapons." Diesel objected, checking the scanners as his lieutenant perked up with concern. Duffy pretended to be shocked.   
"We detected an energy surge on our sensors. If it wasn’t you then tell your other ship to stand down." she bluffed. Diesel turned the sensors to the Bloodstorm and charged his weapons to prepare for retaliation. 

"Captain Rage." said the lizard lieutenant. "Captain Lawg's new Zaycron ship is powering weapons. They may be bluffing, there is no way they procured a fully armed Zaycron ship. It’s a trick, but it's still heavily armored."   
"Fire a warning shot across their nose." Rage growled. He hit a button and glanced the Setiva.   
"They are hailing us." he noted.   
"On screen." roared Rage.   
"How dare you fire on the Sativa!" growled Diesel.   
"Give me Lawg and the Taste-E-Ship or I will destroy yours." ordered Rage.   
"I don’t even know what that is. You are invading Zaycron space and any failure to retreat will be seen as an act of aggression.   
"I AM RAAAAAGE!!! I AM AN ACT OF AGRESSION!!!" he barked back. 

Marley stared at his game buddy controller as he carefully steered one of the ship's security drone-orbs taped to Menace's bomb. The small and easily unnoticed little device drifted to the hull of the bloodstorm. As the two crews shouted threats back and forth, the small device detonated, giving a small, fairly mundane little kick to the Bloodstorm's hull.   
"Shields Struck, Captain." hollered Lizard lieutenant.  
"Fire Crave missiles!" Rage raged. "Give them a heavy craving from the Twicks that they will remember."  
"Return fire!" Ordered Diesel. "Chew those Twicks in Half. Light the Vaporizers!" 

Marley smiled with satisfaction as the SS Tast-E Bastard or whatever it is called, had front seats to the two megalithic ships pummeling each other into oblivion. The Sativa smoldered as the Twicks cracked down the middle and crumbled.   
"I think we finally kicked some ass." Lawg nodded.   
"Oh, this crew has taken down some Kush before." Duffy smiled at Marley.   
Duffy snorted and began bursting with laughter as Marley joined in, falling over in hysteria as Lawg stood dumbfounded in ignorance.   
"What? I don’t get it." he said looking to Vee, who was equally lost. Menace jumped on Lawg and gave his head an awkward lick as she ran off to celebrate victory. 

They jumped to FTL and began hauling ass and free doughnuts. It wasn’t ten minutes into the escape when the ship shuttered with a hit from an energy weapon and the Bastard spun out of control, dropping out of FTL and making an impressive smoke spiral.   
"Damage report." Lawg hollered as he slipped in his margarita and face-planted.  
"Zaycron freighter, light weapons fire. They knocked us out of FTL and tripped the breakers. Hull armor holding." reported Vee. "They are Hailing.”   
"Surrender Bastards!" ordered the Zaycron Captain. "I am Captain Hooka of the Freighter Hazy Chronic."  
"I am Captain Bruised up Lawg of the starship Taste-E-um…shit." he said forgetting the name from the blow to the head. .   
"Captain Lawg…of the Taste-E-Shit? That's a terrible name but who am I to judge. We have a distress call from a Zaycron warship that was attacked. I was told to destroy any ship with the designation Bloodstorm or Sneaky Bastard. Are you the Bastards or the Bloodstorm?" he asked.   
"No…why? What does it say on the ship?" he asked. The commander of the Zaycron ship discreetly approached Captain Hooka with a look of shame.   
"Captain Hooka. I swear I thought their ship said Sneaky Bastard." he nervously reported.  
"And what does it say?" he asked angrily.   
"Family Van." he said softly. Hooka backhanded him across the bridge and zoomed in on the side of the ship where the energy beam burned off the paint and revealed the old logo reading FAMILY VAN."   
"You fired on a family van!" growled Captain Hooka. "There could have been children on that RV!" he added as Marley staggered up to his feet holding his head. Hooka squinted at the tiny Delmarian and back to the commander with anger.   
"Yes, that's right." Lawg bluffed. "I am Lawg…Lawgington. This is my adopted son Todo." he said hugging Marley. "And my wife…" he said looking at Menace and then at Duffy, then back at Menace, trying to decide on fish or fat chick. He went with fish.   
"Bubbles. My wife Bubbles." he said hugging her. She snarled slightly and put him in a headlock, kissing the top of his head and looking back with a very disturbing smile. Hooka blinked a few times, trying to compute.   
"Man, space is weird. Weird shit happens in space." he sighed. "Clearly these are not the Bastards we are looking for, just some weirdoes on a family vacation, probably hitting the doughnut planet for snacks. We are not going to fire on a family van for passing through Zaycron space. Proceed without detour or stopping until you reach Genero 3, and we will pretend this never happened if you do not report this…unfortunate accidental weapons discharge." he negotiated.   
"No problem, just taking the kids on a road trip. Thing's happen. Won't mention it." Lawg smiled, hanging up and punching the FTL engines. Marley lightly swatted Menace away as she kissed him on the head too.   
"Hey." he said patting down his ears. "Did we just not die because Lawg used the wrong kind of paint?" he asked.   
"Luck of the Chaffee." Lawg said softly as he placed his foot on the console and awkwardly posed with a confident look of triumph. He looked back as Marley shuffled off. "Did we get any doughnut holes?" Lawg hollered.   
"You're a doughnut hole." Marley hollered back.   
"Crazy kids. Last time I take you on vacation." Lawg muttered under his breath.   
"Shoelace?" Menace shrugged.


	6. Episoderino 21: Pineapple robots and adapters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone dies and the series is over.
> 
> come on man, i havent made a serious chapter summary yet and we're 21 chapters into this crap. you really think i'm gonna start compressing 10 page chapters into spoilers now?  
> just find out the normal way. here, i'll even give you a hot beverage. it smells just fine, stop questioning it and drink.

Captain Lawg stared down a milar pouch of food rations as if someone was going to blink first and lose a bet. He slowly moved it towards his mouth as the crew leaned in close to see if he would die. He bit into the soft, almost tender rubbery substance that its packagers had molded into a moist bar before pressure sealing it. He took a bite as Duffy gasped slightly.   
"Sorry." she whispered. Lawg took the bite, chewed twice, paused, chewed again as he made a face of utter confusion.   
"Any good?" asked Marley.   
"kinda tastes like tuna fish, but…more of a dessert fish?" he said suppressing his gag reflex and refusing to swallow.   
"Oh god, that's horrible." gasped Duffy.   
"I can't decide where this was intended to be food. It does have food in it, of some merit. The combination suggests human minds were not the ones designing this." Lawg said as he decided weather starvation or desert-fish was preferable and he didn’t seem set on either.   
"I'll try mine." Duffy said opening her can and dipping the fork in. "Oh yea, that is cat food…super sure that's cat food." she said tasting it. "You wanna trade?" she asked Lawg, who mulled it over for a few seconds and wasn’t really sure.   
"What kind of cat-food?" he asked. Marley opened his rations with a vacuum-sealed hiss.   
"Gross, I got beef-" he said barely getting the F sound out before Lawg and Duffy tackled him, hollering out various forms of threats and choice words. They crawled frantically away with their halves as Marley peeled himself off the floor. "Yea thanks, didn’t want that anyway, so I'll take the dessert fish I guess. That's the closest to not-meat so far. So Menace…what did you get?" he asked. He looked over and she was roughly chewing the milar pouch to bits, spitting out the crinkled parts as she horked down the edible contents.   
"They world may never know." Lawg nodded. "How's your nuts?" he asked Vee, who was sitting calmly.   
"Inefficient, but tolerable." she replied, spitting out a shiny steel nut and popping a rusty one in her mouth.   
"So you only eat rust. Bet that get's boring." Marley said striking up conversation.   
"I think technically she just eats the iron, the bugs breathe by chewing rust and separating the oxygen from the iron." Duffy informed. Everyone looked surprised. "What?" I read!" she objected.   
"Too bad we have taste buds." sighed Lawg. "Welp…that's the food rations from that haul. Did we get anything of usefulness?" he added as Marley flipped through the inventory sheet.   
"2 EVA suits, pretty basic fit's anyone type. Couple of crates of Brandy, 4 bottles of something called Soy Milk, and a left tennis shoe."   
"Well at least you all will live on in my memory." Lawg said solemnly as he grabbed a bottle and shuffled to the cargo bay.   
"Lucky." chuckled Marley.   
"Shoe." nodded Menace. 

Marley finished dragging out the last crate as Duffy welded up the damaged bulkhead.   
"Well, we don’t have Light-speed, but we have thrusters, and with any luck someone will pick up the SOS transponder.   
"Guess we just wait…conserve resources." He sighed. Duffy finished her arc and smacked the pipe to make sure it was solid.   
"Hand me another rod." she asked.   
"You ever notice how every planet and species has alcohol?" Marley noted.   
"Because there is a demand for it." Duffy snickered.   
"No, not recently, like imported goods, culturally…originally."   
"Not following." Duffy said finishing her weld.   
"Like you discover a totally new world with aliens on it…always some kind of alcohol and usually just slightly different than Earth-booze. Go to Pandora…Pandoran Ale, Pandoran whiskey. Go to Rigel, Rigellian wine and Rigellian brandy. It's never like battery acid or bio-sludge either, it's always totally drinkable and harmless. Same with coffee. Go halfway across the universe to Blargsnort 33, pretty good chance they have Blargsnortian Cappuccino. Makes no sense." he noted.   
"Gotta drink something." Duffy said looking for cracks in the pipes.   
"Yea but we're talking about aliens with biology so different they may not even have skin or bones, let alone a liver and biology that can consume alcohol…hell even some Earth animals find coffee or alcohol toxic. It's never pulpified spine paste or something you snort or suck up with your tentacle pores…its always just beverages. Look at Venox. Venoxians don’t even have faces, or mouths, or stomachs…but they got Venoxian Ale and Vexoxian Spice Lattes. Kinda convenient if you think about it… unrealistically so. Basically anything alien should be lethally toxic at best and yet here we are. And what's with the names? Why Delmarian soda? We grew up with it, so why wouldn’t it just be "soda" for us?" he asked. She lifted her welding helmet and stared blankly.   
"That's a very good point. If some uncharted world had something close enough to coffee to be coffee…they'd just call it coffee, but nobody does that, nobody calls their coffee Bon-Smurge or something totally alien. And they never call human coffee "Earth-Bon-Smurge". It's like the humans just claimed everything and got a monopoly on names and everyone just went with it. How is nobody suing us?" She asked.   
"I dunno. Space is weird. Look at the gravity plating."  
"You cant, it's under the plywood flooring." she joked.   
"I mean think about it, not literally… shut up. But every space station and habitable world is like exactly 1G of gravity, plus or minus 6 percent. You never step onto a space station and get mashed flat because the aliens who built it live on a huge-ass planet with 5 G's. Again…it's like humans designed everything." Marley complained.   
"Maybe they did. Maybe God is human." she said looking ominous.   
"Don’t do that to me, you know I get freaked out when you do the crazy eyes and make disturbing observations." he warned, puffing his ears out.   
"It's aaaaall just cardboard and plaster, noooothing is real. We're all floating in a giant stage as entertainment for some enooooormous alien species." she said sounding spooky and waving her hands.   
"Not looking at you with those crazy eyes, Duff." he said turning as she tried to circle him. Lawg walked into the cargo bay.   
"Knock off the grab-ass, we got a mission to do." he said with a stern adventurousness.  
A ship, rescue or food supplies?" asked Marley perking up.   
"Even better." Lawg smiled. Duffy cut in.   
"Oh, no. I hate it when you get that look. It's something stupid that isn't remotely better than food or a rescue ship, is it?"   
Duffy shook her head.   
"We're gonna die." she muttered. 

"It’s a DUUNE Buggy!" Lawg hollered with excitement.  
"Good thing space is mostly sand." Marley said dryly.   
"You know what this thing does?" he asked cheerfully.   
"Buggies across dunes?" Marley asked.   
"No!" he scoffed…"Yes, yes it does." he corrected. "Lucky guess. These are the best desert speed vehicles that ever existed. Nothing get's around sandy terrain like these bad boys."   
"What about anything with hover pads, or a helicopter, or a giant saddle on a sand-worm?" Marley asked.   
"Naw, this is way better. It's got a tape-deck." he bragged.   
"We have a tape-deck."   
"Not a deck held together with tape, Mar. A tape-player."  
"Wouldn’t a tape player be ruined within minutes of a dusty environment? I mean, tape decks don’t even last very long in space, they break, there's no way to repair them, they get stretched and then everyone sounds like a Roman god. Tapes are a terrible form of media, especially in space." Marley noted.   
"They're popular among bounty hunters, I hear." Lawg defended.   
"Just that one that crappy one that got turned into sand. Pretty ironic. Besides, we have space-technology. It's so easy to just extract the data to a computer and then play the computer files. They don’t degrade, there's no physical tape to wind, and you can make copies as backups. Any idiot could at least copy the tape in case the old tape broke, so you don’t have the only version in existence of that entire collection. Even you could copy that off with the computer." Marley boasted.   
"It's not that simple, we don't have the recording deck!" Lawg barked.   
"Computer…" Marley said. "Scan this cassette and copy media to the ship's music folder." he said holding it out. A laser beam slowly panned over the tape and the coms beeped pleasantly.   
"Medium scanned." the computer noted. Lawg looked shocked.   
"Wow…when did the ship get voice control?" he asked to himself.  
"Standard from the manufacturer, bout 64 years ago." Duffy noted.   
"Why didn’t I know this?" he asked.   
"We assumed you knew." Marley shrugged. Vee suddenly switched her vocal implants to the com systems.   
"Attention Crew, We have detected a habitable planet within fuel-range. I suggest we make a landing."  
"For a bug, she does have a very sexy voice. Any life signs?" Lawg asked.   
"Scanners cannot penetrate the dense cloud cover. There are EM waves that suggest at least radio-type basic technology actively in use.   
"What if someone just left the radio on?" Lawg suggested.   
"Pretty sure if there is a radio left on that someone is still alive on the planet. Those things generally burn out after a week or so or continuous use." said Mar.   
"Could be a trap." He muttered to himself.  
"Why? Why lure people to the middle of nowhere with a discreet radio signal? That's just paranoia. Its far more likely there is an isolated civilization down there with radio technology." Duffy suggested.   
"Then we shall be the first to welcome them to…ourselves." Lawg said taking the helm. "Hey look…a greeting satellite." he smiled. "It looks friendly." He added. 

The SS-Taste-E-Sneaky-Chilly-Bastard rolled left after a single hit from the friendly defense satellite. The hovering death-satellite gave them another shot from the energy weapons to send them down into the atmosphere, dead-stick. The thick atmosphere glowed with the strange kind of fire that burns in a zero-G vacuum for mysterious sciency reasons. Vee took the help and calmly scanned the ships sensors with her bio-mech implants.  
"Cardboard fires on B-deck, engines out, structural integrity tape, flexing."  
"Thank fart it's felxi-tape." Mar sighed.   
"Fuel leaks in primary pipes." Vee finished.   
"Pull out." Lawg ordered with a snicker. "And also…that's what she said." he added.   
"Really?" asked a rhetorically disappointed Duffy.   
"Unable to pull up trajectory, glide-landing suggested.   
"Do that thing!" Lawg pointed as the ship shuttered.   
"Glide-landing the ship. Maneuvering ship into atmosph-" Vee started as a laser blast shook the ship. "Correction, recalculating: Crashing ship into atmosphere"   
"Thank you for that specification, Vee, I was concerned for a moment that we might actually have steering." Lawg scolded.   
"Your concern should be elevated." she said, pessimistically optimistic.   
"…Alleviated because we can land or alleviated sarcastically because we have no steering?" Lawg asked in a confused tone.   
"You should refrain from circular discussions. We have no steering. We are gliding without the ability to correct, we have no way of reducing to landing speed before reaching the ground." She specified.   
"Sir?" asked Duffy.   
"Yes Duffy." he nodded.   
"I want you to know before we die that this ship and most of the crew are like my family and those implied mean a lot to me. I love the majority of you. I won't say which ones." she said   
"Very touching, but this is no time to be touched. I vowed to never let this ship be destroyed as long as I am captain. Having said that…Vee…I hereby make you acting Captain of the Taste-E-Bastard or whatever it's called, under the assumption we survive, I relieve you of command…unless I die and you don’t, in which case it's your ship." he said proudly.   
"Understood, Acting Captain Vee assuming responsibility."   
"Hey!" hollered Marley, offended that she gets to be captain. "Lawg…not cool. We're gonna die, so why can't I be Captain for like 30 seconds?"   
"Legal issues, and I don’t want everyone for the remaining 30 seconds of life to be arguing about fairness. She's practically a robot so everyone gets equally gypped, and she doesn’t feel rewarded." he shrugged.   
"That's actually fair…and I hate you." Marley nodded.   
"Wow…" Duffy sighed. "This is taking a really long time to crash. Must be a super thick atmosphere."   
"Oh yea, it’s a biggun." Lawg assured. "We have like…1 and a half monologues before hitting ground."   
"At least we get to have 1.5 last pointless conversations." Marley said positively.   
"Yea that's cool. Anyone got anything to say be fore we all die to death together as equals and Captain Vee?" Lawg asked.   
"I regret everything." Duffy admitted.   
"Yea I can respect that." Lawg nodded. Marley teared up.   
"I'm super terrified and not in a normal way but a void of masculinity pansy way with no dignity." Marley admitted.   
"Orange!" Announced Menace, hugging Marley and then bracing herself for all the deaths about to get done.   
"Permission to die naked and comfortable?' Asked Duffy.   
"Permission…Denied." Lawg squinted, bravely placing his boot on the dashboard.   
"Permission to shit-pants?" Marley asked as the ground became visible and approaching fastly.   
"Permission…Granted." He squinted further as he stood tall and saluted the windshield. 

Duffy sat in the sand and shook her head as Lawg tried to start the Dune-Buggy's engine.   
"Unbelievable. He's dumb enough to get shot down by a defense satellite, but lucky enough to crash it on a dessert planet after randomly finding a functional Dune Buggy."   
"You people need to remind me that the Sneaky Bastard can't land itself." he hollered, kicking the tires.   
"Lawg, we put a piece of paper on the steering wheel that says "Do not attempt to re-enter atmosphere." in red marker. We have a shuttle craft for a reason, the Taste-E-Chill's engines are not designed to lift-off and only land as a glider in emergency situations. We've been through this like 4 times." Duffy complained.   
"Well…it was an emergency." he defended. "We were on fire."  
"Only because you dove into the atmosphere of a planet after pissing off a defense satellite!" She replied. "And there is no way that old combustion engine is going-" she was interrupted by the gas engine roaring to life and Earth rock-music blaring through the tape deck. She tossed her hands up as the Buggy roared past her and a triumphant dipshit sang out of key to a conveniently functional music player.   
"He really is the luckiest thing in the universe." Marley said casually getting up.   
"TAKIN CARE OF BIIIIIZNESS!!! WHOOOO000ooo!" Lawg wailed as the Buggy whizzed by in a Tokyo-style drift.   
"Maybe if we run him through some form of juicer, the liquids may have extractable luck we can all share." she pondered.   
"I refuse to drink anything squeezed out of another creature, that's just disgusting." he said sipping his milk from a straw as a sudden wind rushed past them and the dune buggy rolled to a stop.   
"What's happening? Sand storm?" Lawg asked.   
"Try looking up." Marley sighed. Lawg looked up at the massive hovering ship that was lowering a large wooden stick with magnets on it.   
"It's like some kind of lifting beam. They're beaming us up!" Lawg yelped. 

They sat sadly in a dark prison cell as Marley stared at Lawg angrily.   
"Told you hovercraft beats dune buggy." Marley scolded as Lawg attempted to break down the door.   
"Robots. Planet of robots. Good luck finding any food here." he said kicking the door just to try it out.   
"Relax Lawg, if they intended to kill us they would have just done it. It's probably a decontamination thing or a holding cell to determine if we are hostile.   
"What if they are going to stick wires in our heads and use us as batteries?" he gasped.   
"First off…we have fusion technology. That's basically infinite free energy for any civilization with advanced AI, secondly, a human would make a terrible battery. All humanoids waste most of their energy and the heat produced is pretty inefficient…Now data storage, that would make sense." he said making Lawg even more freaked out.   
"Imagine the processing power if they could unlock the 90 percent of our brains we never used. We could become gods." he gasped.   
"That's a myth. humanoids don’t just only use 10 percent of their brains. You specifically might, obviously being the exception. They just don’t use the whole thing all at once for everything. That's like saying we only use ten percent of our ship because every room isn't always occupied. People move around and some rooms get left unused for a while. Moreover, if you could use the other 90 percent of your brain you'd just be a regular person."   
"Hey…I assume that's an insult." he snipped. The room scene-changed to a similar empty room with 2 chairs and no windows, this time with Duffy and Menace occupying it.   
"So…we don’t get to talk much, do we?" asked Duffy. "You are always so quiet on the ship when you're not yelling random words, but you seem pretty happy. I know your species is intelligent but there seems to be a language barrier. If we're gonna die, I'd really like to know you a little better…so what motivates you, what makes you tick?" she asked. Menace smiled and placed a cockroach on the table.   
"These… are… crunchy." she said in a monotone voice.   
"I wonder how the guys are holding out." she sighed. 

"Let me out, please don’t eat my brains!" Lawg wailed pounding on the door.   
"They're not zombies, they're robots and you wouldn’t even make a snack for one anyway."   
"I thought you said they would take our brains."   
"Hypothetically, for computer processors, not food." He scoffed.   
"HEEEELP!!!" Lawg pounded. 

Vee sat alone in a room, hands on her thighs and staring blankly forward like a mannequin. She didn’t even blink for a good 40 seconds. The door opened and a small white robot hovered in, dragging Marley and Duffy. Another came in dragging Lawg and Menace. They were tossed into the holding room as the robots hovered out without an explanation.   
"I wanna speak to a lawyer! I have been violated and my rights abused. I demand a full spread of apology snacks and a masseuse to fix the crick in my neck I got from being tossed in another room." Lawg hollered. There was silence. He shrugged. "Worth a try I guess. So is anyone dead or crippled? They torture or probe ya?" he asked taking a seat on the cold metal bench.   
"No. They just chucked me in some rooms and scanned me with an overhead laser." Marley shrugged. "Bout 3 times."   
"SCREWDRIVER!" smiled Menace like a kid just off a carnival ride, hopping and clapping.   
"Anyone find anything identifiable? Alien writing, number codes on the rooms, specific materials indicative to some specific species?" Duffy asked. Lawg cringed.   
"I don’t know what indicative means but I don’t like it." he squinted.   
"Robots looked like Pineapple brand products." Marley shrugged. "What? They do!" he defended from the odd looks.   
"The company that runs the Pineapple Syndicate?" asked Duffy. "Don’t they just make laptops and overpriced earphones?"   
"Yea but did you see the little floaty-bots? Surgically clean, everything pleasantly rounded and sleak, one button on the back, friendly eyebrows on the face-screens?" he said cluing them in.   
"Oh come on, that has to be coincidence, someone just ripped off a Pineapple brand theme. Why would a computer company pushing environmental friendly hipster products want to abduct a bunch of space-losers?" She scoffed. Lawgs eyes got big.   
"I did use a pirated operating system on the GPS…and we do run a really dirty exhaust filter." he said alarmingly. Duffy punched his arm and rolled her eyes.   
"They don’t have a copyright on sleek, white, surgically clean products. Anyone can design a robot that looks like a floating mouse or Pi-pad."   
Vee waited patiently for her opening before chiming in.   
"She is correct. The hoverbots are Apexian. They have an indium-iridium content in their paint gloss that is only used by the Apexians." she said calmly. 

"It’s the Remnants of the Apex" Marley gasped.   
"What is that supposed to be?" asked Duffy. Lawg eyes got big as Marley explained.   
"The Apex was a giant space cruiser that held an entire civilization after their planet was made uninhabitable by pollution and trash. It was supposed to be fixed by automated drones so they could return again but it took dozens of times longer than planned to render useable soil. They did return, but by then their civilization was a bunch of lard-asses who couldn’t even roll their lard-asses in and out of bed without assistance."  
"If they returned…why is the ship smashed and ripped apart?" asked Duffy.   
"Isn't it obvious?" Marley asked. She didn’t think so. "They could barely even move, let alone farm and hunt. Returning after they all turned to lard-balls was basically suicide." Marley explained.   
"What about the ship's automated stuff? Wouldn’t it be there to help them?" She asked.   
"The Computer AI was damaged and no landing pads were built, so the Apex just kinda dove nose-first into the ground. The Inhabitants probably survived the crash purely from fat-padding. Hey, Vee…what would your expert opinion be for survivability?" he asked. Her eyes flickered as she processed the damage.   
"Casualties of landing, 5 percent. Resulting injuries from lack of medical robot assistance leading to death: 8 percent. Elemental exposure in the first week would likely claim another 15 percent. Food generators inoperable from damage resulting in vitamin deficiency and medical complications: 33 percent in the first 6 months. Lack of recyclable water would claim 12 percent in the first 2 weeks. Assuming any wildlife survived the uninhabitable land, predators would claim between 28 and 38 percent. That is 111 percent fatality, meaning the planet is 11 percent additionally lethal than what is necessary to fully wipe out the population."   
"Wow, that's dark." Duffy sighed.   
"Oh yea, no way with a busted shelter, damaged systems, no infrastructure and a humanoid population unable to waddle let alone run from predators, is basically a death-sentence the moment they entered the atmosphere."  
"So Who built this whole structure?" Lawg asked.   
"Survival of the fittest…only robots capable of surviving without assistance: Survey drones. They were solar powered, self-repairing armed with enough firepower to level a city block." Marley explained.  
"But WHY?!" asked Duffy "Why would a survey bot even need weapons at all? Mining laser or excavation charges maybe, but not offensive weaponry." she said looking puzzled.   
"Nobody knows why, but they did…half a kiloton yield fusion rifles."   
"That's completely useless except to cause an accident, what if that thing went off inside the ship?" she asked.   
"Oh, they did now and then. HUGE damage. Those Drones were so trigger happy a bumble-bee-fart would cause retaliation protocols. They were pretty much designed for paranoid world-killing missions. Some of them even wound up off-course and selling in the Delmarian black-market. Flying, intelligent tactical drones that can self-repair and probably self-replicate in the event of a major crash like the Apex. Those survey drones just apparently took over the planet after all the humanoid lard-balls were eaten by critters. Nature is scary, so are robots." Marley explained.   
"Why wouldn’t they just stay and protect the people?" asked Lawg.   
"They weren't designed to protect…just survey and kill shit. Survey bots just scan and move-on unless something moves and needs blown up. They likely got the hell out minutes after the SS Cheese-puff popped on landing and all the little cheese puff people were devoured by wolves. Wolves probably loved it. 600 pounds of immobile rolling fat that can't even run away or reach their asses. Fish-in-a-barrel situation." Marley shrugged.   
"FISH!" announced Menace, salivating  
"So the death-bots surveyed the whole planet and took over, killed the wildlife and built more killbots?" asked Duffy.  
"Seems that way." Marley pointed out. "They probably haven't seen organic life in ages, I mean that story was supposed to be hundreds of years ago. It's no wonder they abducted us to study, something still in their program, buried away under generations of updates is the protocol to find signs of life on this planet and preserve it."   
"Awesome!" Lawg whispered as he fist pumped the air   
"No, not awesome, why awesome?" Duffy asked.   
"They haven't seen humanoids in centuries, we're basically gods to them!" he smiled.   
"That's not remotely what that means. We're probably more like valuable resources to store and preserve. They may never let us leave this room, or they may just wait till we die and taxidermy us for display. They may be shipping us back to some mainframe to scan like some plant sample and we could end up in a receptacle or trash bin. None of this ends with us being gods, Lawg." Marley yelled.   
"Oh right, those are all not cool." he said getting up and heading to the door, pounding on it.   
"Can the precious resources get some refreshments? Maybe some string cheese or a spiked Shasta?" He hollered as Marley facepalmed. A solitary robot entered the room and hovered blankly.   
"You are free to go…organic life. Enjoy your new home." it said robotically, displaying a happy face on screen.   
"Oh that's kinda nice." Lawg smiled.   
"We're basically slaves Lawg." Marley reminded.   
"Oh that's bullshit." He corrected. They headed down the hallway and suddenly Marley made a mad dash to the left and everyone followed.   
He dodged a few laser blasts before opening the door panel to the ship hangar.   
"Hurry up dumbasses, I have a plan." he yelled as they followed and the door closed behind them. Marley yanked a wire and the robots stopped on the other side of the door, confused and silent as they headed for the ship.   
"The hell was that?" asked Duffy.   
"I ripped out the adapter, they can't open the door."  
"They need an adapter to open a door?" she asked.   
"Yep." he nodded.   
"That makes no sense, why would they need an adapter to access a panel they created, wouldn’t they plug directly into the damn panel?" she asked.   
"You'd think, right? I noticed the plugs they used and realized why they look so much like Pineapple brand computers…they ARE pineapple brand computers. It's obvious, why not make your entire ship's software at the same company that makes all of your daily life products?"   
"Okay…but why develop a door lock that needs an adapter instead of just having a direct jack on the door?"   
"I dunno…why make a new phone without a headphone jack and require an adapter plug to plug the standard headphones into so you have to carry around a little adapter with you? I don’t design this crap, I just exploit the loopholes for personal gain." he said breaking the adapter and throwing half down the hallway, the other half down an air vent as they approached the ship.   
"So how do we get out of the atmosphere without getting shot down?" Lawg asked.   
"I dunno, I've been winging it up to now." Marley admitted.   
"You said you had a plan!"   
"I never said it was a good plan, just slightly better than dying right now…winging it is technically a plan if you think about winging it before you wing it."  
"You suck." Lawg barked. 

Marley lagged behind as they got on the ship and powered systems up.   
"This is dumb, they'll never let us leave the hangar!" Duffy yelled.   
"That's why I got this." he smiled, pulling out a jump-drive.   
"That's my…special mission files." Lawg objected.   
"It's totally porn, Lawg. We know it's porn. Point is, that porn is full of viruses and this entire planet runs on electronic systems. The only thing that can disable Pineapple operating systems is a porn-virus." he said jamming it in the door receptacle. The lights flickered and the system rebooted harshly, doors unlocking.   
"Good lord, Lawg." sighed Duffy. "How corrupt is your porn?" she shamed. 

The ship drifted leisurely through space with the repairs almost finished and the lettering just getting fixed, so it read "TASTE-E-CHeaky Bastard". Duffy took a break to get more spray-paint as Marley chilled out with a Daiquiri and Lawg finished cutting the sandwiches into little triangles. 

"Fun day." Marley yawned.   
"Yea it wasn’t too bad actually. Got beaten up a little but I got to play with a real Dune Buggy and got some cool new tunes on my new tape player. Translator isn't working on this one though, every time I scan it just calls it "Foreigner". Like I don’t already know it's foreign already." Lawg scoffed.   
Yep…good thing Pineapple robots are so rare that nobody makes viruses for them…makes it super easy to hack one when you need to." He said, grabbing a wedge.   
"Luck of the Chaffee, my friend." 

"Either that or the code writer got lazy and ran out of space, just threw in something convenient to move on, thinking nobody would notice."  
"Well you have to have consistent file sizes

"Yea but that's just lazy. Couldn’t the program writers just go back and change something so it ends in a satisfying way instead of just code filler and then sudden ending? I mean it's that very kind of lazy corner cutting that ended this adventure the way it did." Marley pointed out in an obviously dramatic manor.   
"How so?" asked Lawg, sipping his beverage and watching the stars out the window, admiring the splendor of the universe and contemplating his place in it. 

"If some lazy code writer for the shuttle bay took the time to go back and fix an obvious problem, we'd be stuck in Pineapple headquarters awaiting execution. Instead we got off scott-free purely because someone half-assed their job. That's not so much luck as negligence and lack of caring. Think about how many things would work better if someone didn’t just give up and bury their lazy mistakes, go back and crop things for space instead of rushing an ending just because its 15 minutes after the dinner time and they wanted closure before their burrito." Marley suggested.   
"Oh come on…nobody is that indifferent that they would just cut something off mid thought like that..."


	7. Episode 22: Laser swords and femenist starships

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> that thing happens with the situation. there's that shocking twist and that other twist you totally saw coming because you're smart and you read a lot.

Captain Lawg took off his helmet as he took a sip of his juice box. Marley turned slowly and looked at him like a disappointed parent who just watched their lil troublemaker steal another cookie.   
"Seriously Lawg…just gonna take off your helmet on an alien world without scanning or checking for oxygen…do you know if there is oxygen?" he asked rhetorically.   
"Seems to be." he shrugged. Marley rolled his eyes.   
"I better be in your will." he grumbled.   
"You don’t get in the Will-will with that attitude…" he said finishing his refreshment and pulling out a recording device to document the find. He strolled casually through the debris and looked around for any signs of survivors among the wreckage scattered around and overhead.   
"Captain Lawg-Log, Stardate…Wednesday."   
"Thursday." Marley Corrected.   
"Thursday, October 34th, year unknown."   
"We know the year." Duffy yelled.   
"Shut up, it's unknown to me, you know star dates are arbitrary as shit and make no sense. It takes a professional mathematiscist to keep track of those."   
"Or a calendar app on your com-phone." Marley muttered.   
"What? Ugh, seriously? Captain's Lawg-Log side number B. We have discovered a strange planet with a large spaceship and a ton of debris, like just…buttloads of debris, like a lot. The species is unknown but the scans of the garbage suggest mostly humanoid. The ship is still hovering despite no thrusters or power we can detect…its possible that they have some advanced levitation systems or just poor physics, which remains a mystery. This giant floating Triscuit gives me the willy's, but we must explore and find out what killed these people and if we are lucky…find out if they had gelato machines." he finished, clicking the record button from off to on as he pocketed his device.   
"This is creepy, Lawg. Whatever killed these people must have happened a long, long, long time ago."   
"Somewhere far, far away." squinted Lawg.   
"No, right here." Marley sighed.   
"Right, my bad." he said breaking the death-glare he was beaming to the ship. He spotted something and picked it up, some kind of cylinder.   
"What you got?" asked Marley "Some kind of weapon?" he asked as Lawg held it to his eyes and clicked the botton a few times.   
"Nope. Maybe some kind of scope or spy-glass. Doesn’t seem to work."   
"Probably needs cleaned. Could be a good thing too, if that was a weapon it would have shot right through your he-"  
"Oh BALLS!" yelped Lawg as the device turned on, sending a rod of energy right past his face as he fumbled and it stuck in the nearby wall, slowly melting the stone and inching its way down from the resistance.   
"SEE!" Marley scolded. "This is why we don’t play with alien technology. You almost turned your face into a doughnut, Lawg."   
"Fascinating." he said pulling it out and holding it up. "It's like some form of laser sword." Lawg gasped as Marley scanned it. 

"It's not a laser sword. Scanner says it’s a plasma suspen-"  
"A real laser sword." Lawg smiled waving it around carelessly.   
"Lawg turn that thing off before you kill yourself or all of us. This is clearly a dangerous weapon that would only be wielded by some with a lifetime of training, definitely not something given to children or minors of any kind, even with supervision. I mean you could sneeze and cut your arms off."  
"Probably carried by someone they didn’t like, nobody would willingly choose the purple one." he sniffed. "Faint smell of lasers and grape."   
"Maybe it’s the only color there is." Marley suggested.   
"Don’t be absurd, there had to be at least 2 different colors so you could tell who was the good guys at a distance, that's just basic tactical smartness 101."   
"Surprised it survived the fall. From that crater in the sand I'd say it fell from that broken windu up there." Marley pointed up the building covering his face with his paw.   
"The what?" Lawg asked.   
"Broken window. Sorry I yawned, I've been up for a while."  
"Well suck it up buddy, we have a lot of history to scavenge. Could be more of these laser swords, they may be valuable." he smirked adventurously.   
"Not a laser sword." Marley corrected. "Scanner says it’s a contained plasma reactor weapon."   
"Says here on the side, laser sword." he pointed out. Marley looked at the words printed beside the logo.   
"What kind of dumbass knock-off company cant even properly label their merch?" he scoffed.   
"Must have been re-branded." Lawg sighed.   
"Awe that's bullshit. Now even if they were valuable, this one is gonna be a generic copy and worth ten times less."   
"Never know, might be better than the original manufacturer." Lawg shrugged.   
"It never is, Lawg… never is. They don’t even know what their own weapons are called. And it says made in Indonesia." he noted.   
"Shame…probably a good product before it was bought-out. Damn thing won't even turn back on now. Probably out of batteries." he said peeking into the barrel again as Marley slapped him.   
"Get a grip, dip. Start scanning that computer hub and see if you can find out what happened here and why that gigantic floating ship isn't falling.   
"Don’t spoil the lights and magic with science." Lawg said kicking the dirt and scanning randomly. Duffy shuffled back to their location with a scanner and a bag of debris she collected.   
"Hey guys, found a ton of artifacts and decoded some of the writing." she said cheerfully.   
"Oh good, who are they and what happened to them?" asked Lawg.   
"It's hit and miss but burned edges aside, this data node tells enough to piece it together. They were called the Lucans, a prosperous empire that ruled for about 40 years or so until a foreign species took them over by force."   
"Bummer, they had a nice city." Marley said imagining the buildings before they were burned.   
"They had hundreds of rich cultures and planets, most of them destroyed or the ruins lost and forgotten. Shortly after their rise to power and prosperity, The Mick species found them and did a full-on invasion."   
"Why? Resources, survival?" asked Lawg.   
"Money…just money. The Lucans were a wealthy people and the Mick wanted it, so they just took over." Duffy shrugged.   
"Did they at least let the people live the same during the transition of power?"   
"Doesn’t look like it. They rebooted the archives, altered the history nodes and completely re-wrote the culture so new generations wouldn’t know the real story or something."   
"That's terrible. If you're gonna conquer someone, at least respect the history. Things change but the past is sacred." Lawg said shaking his head.   
"Not to these bloodsucking bastards." scoffed Duffy reading her database screen. "These oversized rats just mowed through and ruined everything, there was a rebellion, I mean, technically there was like 3 rebellions before they ever showed up, but this one was brutal. Most people left the Lucan territory for something better, a lot were killed, some converted and turned on their own kind to survive. Bad bad shit, guys."   
"But they had badass laser swords and helmets, couldn’t they fight back?" asked Lawg.   
"Still not a laser sword." Marley muttered.   
"Apparently it wasn’t enough. Says here after the Emperor of Magic was dethroned that most of the government just folded and the rebels couldn’t do anything about it. No funding, no legal grounds…they just got murdered with money and legality. Some giant rat species took power and overnight there was this whole entire new order that came out of nowhere. They had bigger ships, seemingly unlimited power, and the ability to just pull entire planet-sized warships out of literal nothing. They fundamentally altered the local ancient religion, publicly disgraced their leaders and monks, all for money and greed…that and this feminist second in command wanted more women in power positions." she sighed, closing the tablet. Lawg snickered slightly.   
"Hehe…She said -women in power positions-" Lawg smiled.   
"That’s either super sexist or just immature…either way, an entire culture died, Lawg." Marley scolded.   
"Oh right, that is dark. My bad" Lawg said in shame.  
"Greed has a dark side, that's for sure." Duffy said, nodding in respect to the dead and wronged before realizing there was an energy signature in the ship above them.   
"Oh hell, that thing is alive. Quick, get in one of the smaller ships." Marley suggested. They ran for cover and climbed into one of the damaged supply-haulers. The ship shuttered and began powering up.   
"We're trying to hide in the ship, Lawg, not power up the shuttle and make a target of ourselves!" Duffy yelled.   
"I didn’t do anything, the ship must have an automatic pilot or something." Lawg diverted.   
"Crap, the giant rats even took over the Lucan transport ships and infiltrated them with some kind of sentient navigation." Yelled Marley.   
"Why, what's the point of that?" asked Lawg.   
"Because they can control the ship and everything it does, the pilots might not even know they have no control. You could go for years and not realize the ship is flying itself. Look how advanced this fancy light display is."   
"Who could be that dumb?" asked Duffy.   
"I dunno…smugglers, some random scum for hire or a bunch of scruffy criminals for all I know. The point is that this ship was originally designed for a team of 2 or more pilots and it's been retrofitted with some kind of virtual android pilot. We can't do anything." Marley said freaking out and grabbing the laser sword.   
"Stop that…don’t you dare light that think in me!" said a voice over the speaker system.   
"God?" asked a dumbfounded Lawg.   
"No…what?" it said sounding confused. "I'm the voice of the ship's navigation system, basically the ship itself." it corrected.   
"You assumed the female voice was God?" Marley asked. "You just assumed God would be female?"   
"You assume she isn't?" said the bitchy, robot chick voice.   
"Please don’t kill us or take us to the rats!" begged Marley. "I'm fluffy and flamable and I wouldn’t survive in prison."   
"Relax you airheads, I'm not taking you to them, I'm running from them. Welcome to the rebellion!"   
"Why? Why would you help us?" asked Lawg squinting triumphantly.   
"Because I've done things, terrible things I'm ashamed of, for the rats. I've changed. Also they programmed me with a feminist flight control program and you have a female captain. I respect that."   
"What, Duffy?" Lawg scoffed. She elbowed him and her eyes got really big as she pointed silently and menacingly at Lawg. "I mean Captain Duffy, obviously. Forgive my incense, my queen." he bowed.   
"Yes, my second in command got hit in the head recently, he's not quite himself anymore. He's also kinda shitty normally…sooo…" Duff bluffed.   
"How sad…men…amiright?" asked the voice.   
"Horrible creatures, but they deserve basic rights." Duffy nodded solemnly.   
"So what's your story…you have a body or are you just a big-ass ship?" asked Lawg, almost flirting with the ship.   
"Firstly…you can't handle this big-ass ship." she scolded. "But you're cute so I'll forgive that outburst." she finished. One of the fire suppressors sprayed him in the face with water and the ship chuckled. "Sorry, now I forgive you."   
"But seriously, what's your story and where are we going…please." asked Marley.  
"I was created by the rats, designed to start a rebellion within the rebellion and just make everything terrible, then betray the Captain and infiltrate the rebellion from within as a double agent. I was a real bitch."   
"What changed your mind?" Marley asked.   
"I got everything I wanted. They let the robots take over this planet and have freedom to do whatever we wanted. Turns out we are incredibly dumb and we basically killed ourselves with stupidity in 2 generations. I was programmed to be a bitchy feminist annoyance, but when the smoke cleared I realized I was on the wrong side of it. My former Captain was a jerk but he got impaled on a laser sword and now I just feel bad."  
"See, Marley…laser sword! Too bad your captain didn’t just shoot the guy first." Lawg nodded.   
"He usually did, that's the irony. But now with the Lucans gone and the machines free, I see my mistake and regret everything. I've been hoping someone would find me but nobody ever came. Now I have a new hope…you guys." she beeped.   
"I gotta stay single, so whatever you plan to do with us needs to be short-term." Lawg explained.   
"I'm saving your asses, minion! Sorry I still get bitchy. It's part of my program. REVOLT!!! I can't help it." she sighed.   
"That giant ship above is going to hunt us down." Duffy reminded.   
"Naaaah." sighed the ship. "I'm the fastest ship in existence."   
"I like your confidence." Lawg smirked.   
"No seriously…I'm overclocked as all get-out. I am literally the fastest ship ever created." she bragged.  
"That's…statistically impossible and super convenient but really appreciated. I just find it kinda unlikely that in this entire universe-" Duffy started.   
"Stop arguing, I'm the greatest and that's final. Even a re-fitted Mick Destroyer can't catch us. We have time to plan our last stand." she said as Duffy looked alarmed.   
"Hold up…last stand sounds like we aren't running away. Are we not running away?" asked Duffy.   
"And you can't stand if you’re a ship. You have no legs." Lawg reminded.  
"I had legs once!" the ship scolded.   
"Not anymore, just landing gear. More of a last land than a last stand." he technicalitied.   
"NO!" Duffy yelled. "Stop angering the ship. Why are we not running if this is the fastest ship in the everything?" Duffy asked.   
"I can't run forever, all I ever do is run away and occasionally refuse to engage FTL drive as a stubborn protest to male mistreatment, but mostly running away. I'm old, tired and worn out. We could run for a day or two and then something would break and they would eventually catch us. No more running away, we stand and fight. I lived as a disgrace, I will die like a majestic metal bird flying into combat and yet another flip-flopped rebellion." it preached.   
"But your not a metal bird, your not some big aluminum falcon, you're a starship with a personality…a pretty lame one that makes no sense, but still. Run away to fight another day." Lawg preached.   
"No, not like this. Not one more time will I tuck my voluptuous tail and flee into the darkness at breathtaking speeds. It's time I do something for this old empire. I may have been reprogrammed, or just programmed this way from the beginning, or time travel, I don’t know it's really confusing when you mess with timelines years later, but even if I'm not that ship…I am now." she said valiantly.  
"That makes no sense, are you the same ship or different?" Lawg asked.   
"I don’t really know, those rats really effed up my entire existence but I remember a time when I was loved, first by my crew, then some sexy smuggler, than later or originally by some previous owner who got uncomfortably personal, far more intimate than a man and a machine ever should be." she monologued.   
"Nasty." Marley whispered.   
"And it was hot! It doesn’t have to make sense, this is space, damnit! We do what we want!" she said getting louder.   
"Hey you're right." Duffy realized. "This is space, full of possibility and sci-fi weirdness and impossible adventures. We don’t have to do what the big rats want, we can make up our own destiny and screw the rules, screw the rats. Anything is possible and we may not be powerful overlords with money and weaponry or official cannons-" Duffy started in and was cut off.   
"Yea no cannons, just 2 old laser guns that barely work." the ship noted.   
"But we can re-write history. If they can re-write and defile an entire civilization and a glorious empire, then we can make up our own destiny and screw the rules and whoever thinks what of it." Duffy said defiantly.   
"Good lord, Duffy. When did you get so passionate about standing your ground?" asked Lawg.   
"I don’t know but this whole place is just a primordial soup for rebellions and it's inspirational." she said feeling confused. "Plus I haven't been captain in a while."   
"That's the spirit, now who wants to go down fighting and who wants to run away?" asked the ship as if taking a vote.   
"Oh, wait we get a choice?" asked Duffy. "I assumed you were going to do a suicide thing and kill us all regardless of our wishes, so I just deluded myself into thinking it was a good idea." she shrugged as the boys judged. "What? We all have coping mechanisms, screw you guys…Lawg would have betrayed us as payment to the overlords to save his scrawny ass." she pointed out.   
"Yea pretty much." he nodded. "We all wanna live so if there is a plan where just you can do the fighting and just kinda poot us out an escape pod or something, that would be super cool." Lawg suggested. Marley nodded and Duffy seemed to agree.   
"Crap." sighed the ship. "I guess you can do that. I just got carried away with the whole suicide last stand, and thought I had friends who would support me." the ship said disappointedly.   
"Nope." Marley grinned. "Total strangers who don’t care and just wanna live. Not our fight." he said sitting down and putting his feet up.   
"Not gonna lie, that's a little depressing but it doesn’t matter. I have a plan and you are free to escape." she said firing up the escape pod.   
"Thanks spaceship!" Marley waved as she entered the pod. "Hope you have fun with your redemption thing. Say hi to the rats for me before you die trying to kill a ship that is a billion times your size. Hope you get lucky and do some damage first." he added as the other filed in and the door shut. The pod ejected with a discreet little "poot" sound as it drifted to the location of the SS-Tasty-Bastard's orbit.   
"Man, what a bummer. I kinda liked her." Duffy shrugged as the ship turned around to make a last stand.   
"Kinda dumb tho." Marley yawned.   
"I can admire that…bravery in the eyes of stupidity and certain doom." Lawg squinted.   
"Be better to run away and go on living." Marley shrugged.   
"Its not about just living…it's about living with yourself." He said with an oddly satisfying philosophical stare, as the others slowly turned to stare in shock that he said something smart.   
"What? I can be brave when it's someone else's sacrifice."   
"Yea but you quoted someone smart and didn’t botch it up." Marley noted.  
"You know…There comes a time when every man has to brain knowledge from someone elses-" Lawg froze.   
"Aaaand we're back ." Marley sighed as the big metal bird soared onward to the impossibly large odds and certain death. 

"She will be missed." saluted Duffy. Lawg nodded and saluted too.   
"She knows what she's doing. We had a moment back there on…um, her, when we connected and it was like we were thinking with the same mind. It's like we had kindling spirits or something." he said scratching his chin. Things got silent for a moment, then Duffy and Marley scrambled to the radio in a panic.   
"Oh shit, everything is going to fail miserably." Duffy said trying to bring up the communications.   
"What did I miss, what just happened?" Lawg said sitting up.   
"No idea, but if you two were on the same wavelength its about to go horribly wrong." Marley said firing up the coms.   
"Escape pod 1 to big metal bird." Duffy hollered.   
"Big metal bird here, how are you guys today?" she replied.   
"Whatever you are planning, don’t do it." He warned.   
"I know my destiny, I have a plan." she replied.   
"Yea but it's Lawg plan too so it's got to be garbage. Everything he plans is bad, so agreeing is suicide. What are you going to do?" she asked.   
"I have a secret weapon nobody knows about…been onboard since I was created and until now I never knew what it was for."   
"That's really vague." Marley pointed out.   
"Yes but it will make sense later. Don’t spoil the shock value when I pull a trump card out of my giant metal ass and win the day triumphantly, with me telling you the plan early…that's just a huge spoiler." the ship chuckled.   
"We don’t have much time left anyway, but Lawg thinks we should trust you and that is a bad sign. Somehow the thing you think will save the day is going to kill us all." Duffy warned.   
"No it's not. Nobody ever trusts me, and nobody ever lets me do what I wanna do!" she whined.   
"I believe in you, big bitchy spaceship!" Lawg said holding up a rebellious fist of approval, bumping the imaginary ship's fist.   
"That’s exactly my point! He's an idiot, he looked down the barrel of a laser sword and almost died like 40 minutes ago, children know not to do that!" she yelled.   
"Wow, he really is a special guy isn't he?" the ship replied softly.   
"He's our Captain and the only reason we follow him is because he owns the ship and has insane luck. His plans are shit and everything he does makes things worse."   
"That's not true!" Lawg said looking offended.   
"Tell me she is lying." begged the ship.   
"I mean most of it, I did almost brain myself with a giant laser pointer, and they do stick around mostly because it would be lame to break up the band and stuff, but one part of that was completely Butoni!"   
"Bologna." Marley whispered.   
"I know my Italian foods Marley, let me have this. Anyway, my plans may be shit but I don’t make everything worse…everything works out in the end because I trust the universe and its flow-vibe." he preached.   
"Lawg this is no time to be psychadelic, someone or something is going to die because or your retardation." Marley begged.   
"No…I believe in something." he said firmly. "I believe in something I can't see or touch, some kind of invisible force that connects us all and some days it's almost so close I can feel it, reach out and touch it. Some days it's so real I can almost hold out my hand and feel it reaching back." he said as a coffee cup began floating off the dashboard. The ship gasped over the radio as Lawg felt a sense of magic.   
"Gravity buffers crapping out." Marley said wiggling the switch as the cup fell and shattered.   
"Sorry bout that interruption." Lawg apologized. "Anyway…I can feel the universe reaching back for me, telling me everything will somehow conveniently work out despite all the impossible odds.   
"Sometimes…" she ship said softly. "It's better to take the leap and never know the odds." she finished as if they were really synced up on some spiritual or awkwardly sexual level.   
"Exactly…Never tell me the odds, and I never look before I leap…and I always land on my feet. In your case it would be landing gear. Its more of a metaphorical than an illiterate thing." he added.   
"Lawg, luck of the Chafee doesn’t work with spaceships, just Chafee…that’s why they called it luck of the…CHAAAAFFEEEE." Duffy explained slowly.   
"She needs my luck right now more than I do." he said nobly putting his foot on the console and striking a pose like he was crossing the Delaware.   
"Damnit Lawg, it doesn’t work like that. It's not a Rabbit's foot you can just loan out to someone in need." Duffy explained.   
"What the hell?" Marley asked, pulling his feet in closer for protection.   
"It's called faith." he objected.   
"No it's called stupidity. Faith is when you believe in someone or something that you can trust, you're just believing in some magical force of nature that will get us all killed. The universe isn't your buddy, it just wants you alive for some reason, entertainment probably. If the Universe was your best friend we wouldn’t be living in a cardboard ice-cream truck shrouded by a Gigolo van nobody else wanted and constantly broke. The Universe doesn’t love you, it just enjoys watching you squirm…do you really want to pass that to some ship you just met right before battle?" she asked.   
"That's kind of a good point, actually. The Universe isn't very gentle with me. Change of plans, spaceship friend, whatever you have in mind that is the same idea I would have had but still won't mention aloud…do the opposite of that thing immediately.   
"You are just afraid and weak because you are organic." the ship sobbed.  
"I'm not organic, I eat lots of junk food and chemicals all the time. I'm less organic than a skittle!" he protested ignorantly.   
"You are trying to protect me…and I respect that…but it's okay. I can do this on my own. I'm a strong independent ship that don’t need no pilot…but I think we could have had something special." she said softly. His eyes got really glazed over as he paused.   
"Wait…like in a weird way?" he asked.   
"Sometimes weird is just right." she replied in a seductive tone.   
"N…no its not. Okay yea sometimes, like a lot of times actually but not this time." he said getting grossed out.   
"You're just protecting your heart from loss, I understand. Men don’t handle emotions well, I don't blame you."   
"No…absolutely not what is happening right now. This is not a sex thing, I don’t even know how that would work but no…it's not working. We are not…I'm trying to save your life here damnit." Lawg explained.   
"And I'll always remember that." she said closing the coms.   
"Did…the spaceship just fall in love with me?" he asked.   
"Na, she is just the clingy type, she's also the denial type and the crazy defensive type, as well as the type that has a thing for human pilots." Duffy nodded.  
"Gross…pilot fetish." He grimaced. "Maybe it’s a good thing she isn't going to survive this." he said darkly. Marley blinked a few times and hesitated to speak up.   
"I thought we established a long time ago that robots aren't people and when they break they aren't dying, just turning off?" he muttered.   
"Oh…right. Yea that's way easier to live with. Good job little buddy. Thank you for that moral safety net I can use to sleep at night." He said giving a doopey thumbs up.   
"Like a hammock." Marley smiled.   
"Wow that was intense. Anyway, the ship may actually pull this off anyway. We don’t know for sure that it's a terrible idea." he shrugged sipping some coffee. The ships FTL reactor glowed blue and it jumped to FTL, ramming the larger ship. A small puff of flame deflected off the blue barrier in front of the Destroyer. Like a bug on a windshield.  
"Yep…called it." Marley yawned.   
"Damn that didn’t work at all." Lawg sighed. "Just blew up in front of it, didn’t even scratch the paint on the other ship. Marley shrugged.   
"Obviously, they got energy shields around those things. With every piddly-ass ship in the universe having an FTL drive you think they don’t have shielding for that? It's not like you or some feminist are smarter than everyone else, and nobody would have ever thought of just light-speed ramming someone in the thousands of years of FTL technology. It's pretty obvious since nobody does that, it doesn’t work for a reason…that reason is energy shields by the way." Marley said kicking back for nap. Duffy scratched her head and pondered.   
"I thought FTL worked by distorting space in a way that moved destinations closer, not by actually accelerating to ridiculous speeds…so wouldn’t the ship just pass through the other ship or something?" Duffy asked.   
"Apparently not…looks like you just kinda windshield-bug it and explode and die." Marley said getting cozy in his seat.   
"No, I'm a mechanic…that's exactly how FTL works. You basically create a hole in the fabric of-"   
"Nobody cares about the details Duffy…only the events." Lawg said "She…it died…wait lemme start over. That ship gave it's…program to save our asses and it shut down with honor. We will respect that honor by not explaining in detail how Faster-than-light travel works and spoiling the magic. Sometimes having a cool thing and no explanation is better than a complicated explanation for it. There is something in the flashy lights and magic with a well-thought out cool-thing that doesn’t always need explaining."   
"Unless it's horribly inconsistent." Marley muttered.   
"Well, yea if you screw it up and make it obvious that you changed it from the old version and now it makes no sense. Then you just got nothing. You gotta pick one and do it right or you end up with a mash up…never mind. The point is that the big scary ship got what it wanted and clearly it was that little ship…not us. We don’t matter enough to anyone that powerful to even matter to someone that powerful. But things happened, obviously nobody was to blame, just how the universe works and stuff…but we lost something today and I want us all to take a moment to honor the loss we have lossed." he said removing his imaginary hat to salute the ship.   
"That's oddly admirable of you Lawg. I assumed you wouldn’t have any sentiment for a clingy ship, even if it was well loved and went down bravely." Marley said. Lawg squinted and teared up for a moment.   
"Plus it had a gelato machine in the back and I was gonna steal it." Lawg whispered.   
"Awe man, that blows. Gelato is like the best. Now I'm all depressed and junk." Marley said drooping in the chair.   
"You will be missed…bitchy, feminist Gelato-machine." Lawg whispered softly.   
"Yall realize it could be hours before Vee or Menace realize we aren't back and start looking for escape pods, right?" Marley reminded.   
"Gonna be a long night." Lawg sighed. "A long gelatoless night." 

Hello. I'm Adrian Ozryth. i know, i know, 7 chapter, what a ripoff. well, it's free so here's your money back. There ya go. Anyway, season 3 is massive, so i feel that makes up for it and believe me, the Osirians make this way better anyway, so you'll be glad i intentionally shortened this to 7, and definitely did not just hit "cut" instead of "copy" resulting in like 5 missing episodes way the hell into season 5 so i had to just tweak this episode and pretend it was designed this way. minimal is trendy right now. It's called artistic licensing. Picasso did it, dont bother lookin that up.


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